Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
University History Series
James B. Kendrick, Jr.
From Plant Pathologist to
Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources
University of California
1947-1986
With an Introduction by
David P. Gardner
An Interview Conducted by
Ann Lage
in 1987
Underwritten by
The President's Office
University of California
Copyright (c 1989 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing
leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the
development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral
history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an
informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is
transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by
the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form,
indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and other
research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee
in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan,
deeply involved, and irreplaceable.
********************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal
agreement between the University of California and James B.
Kendrick, Jr. The manuscript is thereby made available for
research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft
Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the
written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley.
Request for permission to quote for publication should
be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486
Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and
should include identification of the specific passages to be
quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification
of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as
follows:
James B. Kendrick, Jr. "From Plant Path
ologist to Vice President for Agriculture
and Natural Resources, University of
California, 1947-1986," an oral history
conducted in 1987 by Ann Lage , the Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1989.
Copy no.
JAMES B. KENDRICK, JR.
1986
TABLE OF CONTENTS — James B. Kendrick. Jr.
PREFACE i
INTRODUCTION by David Pierpont Gardner iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY v
EARLY INFLUENCES: FAMILY. COMMUNITY. AND EDUCATION 1
Parents from Farm Families in South Carolina and Iowa 1
Father's Early Career in Plant Pathology 3
The Move to Davis, the "University Farm," 1927 4
Town and Gown Relationships in Davis 7
Religion and Politics in the Kendrick Family 9
Schooling: Academics, Athletics, and Evelyn 11
Entering UC Berkeley, 1938: Bowles Hall Resident 16
Undergraduate Education from Top Faculty Members 19
Going to Mecca: Choosing Wisconsin for Graduate Studies
in Plant Pathology 24
II GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AND WARTIME
SERVICE, 1942-1947 28
Brother's Parallel Path in Plant Pathology 28
Glenn Pound, Fellow Graduate Student 30
The Lasting Influence of J. C. Walker and other Wisconsin
Professors 32
Trademarks of Wisconsin's Training in Plant Pathology 38
A Brief Navy Career 40
Army Training and Assignments: a Waiting Game 42
Completing the Ph.D.: Research on Bacterial Canker of Tomato 47
Appointment at the Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside 50
III CITRUS EXPERIMENT STATION, RIVERSIDE 53
Work of an Agricultural Researcher 53
Agricultural Constituency in Southern California 58
Investigating Vegetable Diseases 60
Establishment of Air Pollution Research Laboratory 62
Sabbatical Year at Cambridge and Rothamsted 66
Promoting Riverside Faculty Unity and Camaraderie 72
IV TRAINING GROUND FOR A UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR: RIVERSIDE
CAMPUS GOVERNANCE 79
Establishment of the Undergraduate Liberal Arts College 79
The New Academics: Relations with Agricultural Researchers
and the Riverside Community 82
Faculty Organization into an Academic Senate 84
Development of a Graduate Program 87
Directing the Design for a Physical Master Plan, 1959 90
Chairman of the Department of Plant Pathology. 1963
Academic Senate Work: Educational Policy, Personnel,
Planning 94
Statewide Senate Involvement
The Academic Council
Organization of the Statewide Agricultural Unit
V PLANT PATHOLOGY DURING YEARS OF CHANGE AT RIVERSIDE 106
A Collection of Specialties 106
Adding Specialists to the Department's Faculty
Trend toward Over-Specialization; Need for Redefinition of
the Field
Graduate Teaching Program Initiated, 1962 113
VI THE KENDRICKS' COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES IN RIVERSIDE 118
Active in Presbyterian Church
Town and Gown Tensions: Explaining the University to
the Community 121
Free Speech Days at Riverside 124
Membership in Community Organizations
Evelyn's School Board Service
An Unexpected Job Offer from President Hitch 129
VII THE FINAL YEARS AT RIVERSIDE 135
Representing the University-wide Faculty during Years of
Turbulence 135
Producing an Academic Plan for Riverside 137
Value of Shared Governance 139
The College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences: Pros and
Cons for Agricultural Research 140
Administrative Organization of College and Experiment
Station 142
Teaching Responsibilities and the Decline of Mission-
Oriented Research 146
VIII VICE PRESIDENT FOR AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES—EARLY CONCERNS 147
President Hitch's Call for a Long-Range Academic Plan 147
Operating a Centralized Unit within the Decentralized
University System 148
Reports of Academic and Advisory Group Committees on the
Division's Direction 149
Pressure from Farming Community. Legislature, Regents:
the Division in a Defensive Position 153
Broadening Representation on the Agricultural Advisory
Council 157
IX PUBLIC SCRUTINY AND LEGAL CHALLENGES TO AGRICULTURAL
PROGRAMS 159
Agricultural Mechanization and Farm Labor Opportunities:
The Vasconcellos Hearings, 1973 159
Budget and Personnel Problems in Nutrition Education 162
The University's Development of the Tomato Harvester 166
Regents' Meetings on Mechanization and Labor Displacement,
1978 170
Legal Action Challenging the University's Agricultural
Program, 1979 174
U.S. Department of Agriculture's Response to the Lawsuit 176
The University's Response and Current Status of the Suit 178
Academic Freedom and the Independence of the Regents 182
X THE RESEARCH BUDGET FOR THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION 184
The Fixed Costs of Permanent Academic Staff Salaries 184
Legislative Protection for Agricultural Research in the
1967 Reagan Budget 186
The Field Station System, Tulelake to Imperial Valley:
Another Fixed Cost 189
The Statewide Critical Applied Research [SCAR] Fund 193
Working with the State Department of Finance 196
XI THE AGRICULTURAL DIVISION AND GOVERNORS REAGAN, BROWN
AND DEUKMEJIAN 198
Relationship with the Reagan Administration 198
Reagan Advisors Earl Coke and Allan Grant 198
Interpreting the University1 s Mission to the Staff and
Community 199
Protection for Philosophical Differences in the Faculty
Promotion Process 200
Supportive Oversight during Reagan' s Governorship 203
Confrontational Regents' Meetings, with Campus
Administrators on the Defensive 204
The Jerry Brown-David Saxon Era 207
Warfare Between the Governor and the Regents 207
Brown and the Budget 210
Extension's Budget Cuts Restored by the Legislature 212
The Budget as a Political Document 214
Brown's Major Agricultural Appointments: Tim Wallace,
Rose Bird, Rich Rominger 216
The Deukmej ian-Gardner Years: Restoring the University's
Stature and Its Budget 220
XII SPECIAL RESEARCH UNITS WITHIN THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT
STATION 226
Giannini Foundation for Research in Agricultural Economics 226
The Original Grant and Organization 226
Restructuring to Meet the Practical Needs of Commercial
Agriculture 229
Agricultural Issues Center 233
The Idea and the Funding 233
Choosing a Diverse Advisory Board 239
Making the West a Force in Agricultural Policy 243
Developing Support for Agriculture in an Urban Society 244
Kearney Foundation for Soil Science 246
Genesis and Direction 246
Flexible Response to the Kesterson Crisis 2A9
Slosson Fund for Ornamental Horticulture 251
Mosquito Research Program: Broadening Decision-Making for
a Cooperative Effort 252
San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Research and Extension
Center 256
A UC Program for the San Joaquin Valley 256
Administrative Changes 259
The Future of Cooperative Extension: Regional Centers? 261
Integrated Pest Management Program 263
A New Concept of Disease and Insect Control 263
Developing Budgetary Support in the Jerry Brown
Administration 265
Wildland Resources Center 268
Sustainable Agriculture Program 270
Serving Small-Scale and Organic Farmers 270
Legislative and Public Input to the Program 272
XIII ADMINISTRATIVE ADJUSTMENTS TO UNIFY THE DIVISION 275
A Historical Overview 275
The Link to the U.S. Department of Agriculture 278
Improving Budgetary Control over "The Provinces" 280
The Day Committee: Coordinated Planning for Allocation
of Resources 282
Resistance to Reallocating Positions between Campuses or
Departments 28A
Centrifugal Forces on Cooperative Extension Planning
Process 285
Combining the Directorship of the Agricultural Experiment
Station with the Vice Presidency. 1973 287
Assuming the Directorship of Cooperative Extension, 1975 290
Explaining the Division to Farm Bureau Members 291
XIV PERSONNEL PROBLEMS IN COOPERATIVE EXTENSION 293
New Problems. New Clientele, New Personnel 293
Inadequate Funding, Staff Reductions, and Charges of
Discrimination 295
The Cooperative Extension Assembly for Career Employees 296
Strong Committee and Kleingartner Evaluations of Accusations
against Extension 298
Another Administrative Reorganization: Lowell Lewis and
Jerry Siebert as Directors 300
No Conspiracy to Discriminate but Some Unclear Policies
and Procedures 302
Continued Tension between an Integrated Program and
Separatist Tendencies 305
The Value of Long-Range Academic Planning in the Division 310
XV THE DIVISION'S RESPONSE TO CULTURAL CONFLICTS AND CHARGES
OF DISCRIMINATION 313
Cultural Conflicts between Traditional Extension Staff and
New Clientele and Staff 313
Affirmative Action Workshops to Sensitize Staff 316
Failings of the Strong Committee Report 316
Commitment to Excellence and the Work Ethic 317
Role of the Regents and the President 319
The Affirmative Action Program in Extension and Its
Positive Accomplishments 320
The Division's Exchange Program with Southern University
in Louisiana 324
Surviving in Troubled Times 329
XVI ADMINISTERING PROGRAMS OUTSIDE THE DIVISION OF AGRICULTURE:
WATER RESOURCES AND UNIVERSITY SERVICES 332
The Water Resources Center and Its Archive 332
Broadening the Disciplinary and Geographic Bases 334
Chairing the Interdisciplinary Coordinating Board 335
Working with an External Advisory Committee 337
The Printing Plant and the University Relations Office 340
Regents' Security Officer, 1976 to 1984 342
UC Retirement System Board: Defining the Board's Role 343
Issues Debated by the Board 345
UCRS Changes under President Gardner 347
XVII OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES PROGRAMS AND CONCERNS 350
Changes in Administrative Responsibilities and Title,
1952-1983 350
College of Natural Resources: Attempting to Establish a
Special Emphasis for the Berkeley Campus 353
The Natural Reserve System 360
Defining Goals, Building Campus Support through an
Academic Planning Process 360
Publicizing the "Best-Kept Secret" in the University 364
The Faculty Advisory Committee 367
Harold Walt, David Gardner, and State Funds for Wildland
Research 368
XVIII NATIONAL LEADERSHIP ACTIVITIES IN AGRICULTURE 372
Agricultural Research Policy Advisory Committee 372
The National Association of State Universities and Land
Grant Colleges' Division of Agriculture 374
Creating the Council of Administrative Heads of Agriculture
(CAHA) 375
CAHA' s Leadership in Budget Development for the Division 376
Foreign Agricultural Programs 379
XIX SUMMING UP 382
Retirement Events 382
Outlook for the Future 383
TAPE GUIDE 386
INDEX 388
University History Series List 393
Biography 400
Memorial Address by David Gardner 404
PREFACE
When President Robert Gordon Sproul proposed that the Regents of the
University of California establish a Regional Oral History Office, he vas
eager to have the office document both the University's history and its impact
on the state. The Regents established the office in 1954, "to tape record
the memoirs of persons who have contributed significantly to the history of
California and the West," thus embracing President Sproul 's vision and
expanding its scope.
Administratively, the new program at Berkeley was placed within the
library, but the budget line was direct to the Office of the President. An
Academic Senate committee served as executive. In the more than three decades
that followed, the program has grown in scope and personnel, and has taken
its place as a division of The Bancroft Library, the University's manuscript
and rare books Library. The essential purpose of the office, however, remains
as it was in the beginning: to document the movers and shakers of California
and the West, and to give special attention to those who have strong and often
continuing links to the University of California.
The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley is the oldest such entity
within the University system, and the University History series is the
Regional Oral History Office's longest established series of memoirs. That
series documents the institutional history of the University. It captures
the flavor of incidents, events, personalities, and details that formal
records cannot reach. It traces the contributions of graduates and faculty
members, officers and staff in the statewide arena, and reveals the ways the
University and the community have learned to deal with each other over time.
The University History series provides background in two areas. First
is the external setting, the ways the University stimulates, serves, and
responds to the community through research, publication, and the education
of generalists and specialists. The other is the internal history that binds
together University participants from a variety of eras and specialties, and
reminds them of interests in common. For faculty, staff, and alumni, the
University History memoirs serve as reminders of the work of predecessors,
and foster a sense of responsibility toward those who will join the University
in years to come. For those who are interviewed, the memoirs present a chance
to express perceptions about the University and its role, and to offer one's
own legacy of memories to the University itself.
The University History series over the years has enjoyed financial
support from a variety of sources. These include alumni groups and individuals,
members of particular industries and those involved in specific subject fields,
campus departments, administrative units and special groups, as well as grants
and private gifts. Some examples follow.
ii
Professor Walton Bean, with the aid of Verne A. Stadtman, Centennial
Editor, conducted a number of significant oral history memoirs in cooperation
with the University's Centennial History Project (1968). More recently, the
Women's Faculty Club supported a series on the club and its members in order
to preserve insights into the role of women in the faculty, in research areas,
and in administrative fields. Guided by Richard Erickson, the Alumni
Association has supported a variety of interviews, including those with Ida
Sproul, wife of the President; athletic coaches Clint Evans and Brutus
Hamilton; and alumnus Jean Carter Witter.
The California Wine Industry Series reached to the University campus
by featuring Professors Maynard A. Amerine and William V. Cruess, among
others. Regent Elinor Heller was interviewed in the series on California
Women Political Leaders, with support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities; her oral history included an extensive discussion of her years
with the University through interviews funded by her family's gift to the
University.
On campus, the Friends of the East Asiatic Library and the UC Berkeley
Foundation supported the memoir of Elizabeth Huff, the Library's founder;
the Water Resources Center provided for the interviews of Professors Percy
H. McGaughey, Sidney T. Harding, and Wilfred Langelier. Their own academic
units and friends joined to contribute for such memoirists as Dean Ewald T.
Grether, Business Administration; Professor Garff Wilson, Public Ceremonies;
Regents' Secretary Marjorie Woolman; and Dean Morrough P. O'Brien, Engineering,
As the class gift on their 50th Anniversary, the Class of 1931 endowed
an oral history series titled "The University of California, Source of
Community Leaders." These interviews will reflect President Sproul 's vision
by encompassing leadership both state- and nationwide, as well as in special
fields, and will include memoirists from the University's alumni, faculty
members, and administrators. The first oral histories focused on President
Sproul himself. Interviews with 34 key individuals dealt with his career
from student years in the early 1900s through his term as the University's
llth President, from 1930 to 1958.
•
More recently, University President David Pierpont Gardner has shown
his interest in and support for oral histories, as a result of his own views
and in harmony with President Sproul 's original intent. The University
History memoirs continue to document the life of the University and to link
its community more closely — Regents, alumni, faculty, staff members, and
students. Through these oral history interviews, the University keeps its
own history alive, along with the flavor of irreplaceable personal memories,
experiences, and perceptions.
A full list of completed memoirs and those in process in the series is
included in this volume.
ill
The Regional Oral History Office is under the administrative supervision
of Professor James D. Hart, the Director of The Bancroft Library.
Willa K. Baum
Division Head
Regional Oral History Office
Harriet Nathan
Project Head
University History Series
9 November 1987
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California
iv
INTRODUCTION
Compelling* colorful, and abundant in success stories, the history of
the University's involvement in agriculture from the days of Eugene Hilgard
to the present is well worth the telling — and the reading. The special-
even unique — value of this oral history is that it represents a firsthand
account of a fascinating chapter in the evolution of the University's role
in the development of California agriculture during a time of change and
adaptation, told by someone who was not simply a spectator of those events
but an active and engaged participant.
I first met Jim Kendrick in 1971, when I joined the Office of the
President in Berkeley as the vice president responsible for the Extended
University, University Extension, and an array of public service programs.
Among my fellow vice presidents was a friendly and outgoing gentleman whom I
instantly and instinctively liked. That, of course, was Jim Kendrick, whose
informal manner and common touch hid a deep acumen about people and a
formidable knowledge of California agriculture, from Davis to San Diego,
from Del Norte County to the Mexican border.
My own early experience working for the California Farm Bureau had
educated me in the dynamics of California agriculture, and gave me an even
deeper admiration than I would otherwise have had for the breadth and scope
of Jim's understanding of agriculture's role — in the University and in the
state — and his grasp of its great potential and its equally great
challenges. Here you will find, distilled in his own characteristic style,
the rich experiences of a lifetime's involvement with a great university and
with California's most important economic activity. Few people could match
his experience and his knowledge; no one could tell it as vividly or as
well; and few have served the University of California with such unstinting
devotion, effect, and skill as has Jim Kendrick. I commend this oral
history to you.
David Pierpont Gardner
President, University of California
January, 1989
INTERVIEW HISTORY
This oral history memoir with James B. Kendrick, Jr., records a
lifetime involvement with the University of California. It includes
observations from a close association with three campuses of the University
and nearly two decades as a leader in the University's statewide
administration.
Kendrick's youth was spent in Davis, California, where his father,
James Kendrick, Sr., was a prominent plant pathologist and eventually head
of the Department of Plant Pathology. After graduation from high school, he
attended the University of California's Berkeley campus, where his major in
general curriculum brought him in contact with a group of inspiring
professors and helped him define his interest in following his father's
career path. After a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and wartime
service, Kendrick returned to the University of California as a junior plant
pathologist at the Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside in 1947.
For the next twenty-one years, his own path from agricultural
researcher to head of the Department of Plant Pathology, with increasing
involvement in university governance, paralleled the growth to prominence of
the Riverside campus. Kendrick's interview provides valuable observations
on the establishment of the College of Letters and Science and eventual
expansion to a full UC campus, with the concomitant tensions between town
and gown and between the agricultural station and the general campus. He
describes his and others' efforts to promote faculty camaraderie and good
relations with the community. He also demonstrates how his faculty
committee work in academic and physical planning, educational policy, and
personnel evaluation prepared him for his appointment as vice president for
the statewide Division of Agricultural Sciences in 1968.
The major part of the oral history is devoted to the nearly two decades
of leadership of the University's "tenth campus" — what is now called the
Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The division is a complex
collection of diverse units, in every part of California. Because authority
or funding for most of these units is shared with individual campuses, with
local counties, and with the federal government, the vice-president at the
systemwide level places his program in effect only through persuasiveness,
patience, and good-humored persistance.
In developing the division's program, Kendrick was obliged to listen to
a multiplicity of interest groups, including representatives of the diverse
elements of the agricultural community that the University serves; the
legislative and executive branches of the state government; federal mandates
for federally funded programs; and the farm labor and minority communities,
who were not the traditional constituency of the division's programs and
who expressed their concerns through protests and lawsuits rather than the
customary program advisory committees.
vl
Kendrick's discussion of how he attempted to move the division in the
direction of serving a broader constituency and meeting new societal
concerns begins with an explanation of the fixed nature of the program and
the personnel in his two major units: the Agricultural Experiment Station
and the Cooperative Extension Service. He then demonstrates how he managed
to introduce flexibility into the programs and to bring sometimes entrenched
personnel into line with new division demands. His survey of ongoing
projects and new directions gives the reader an overview of these two units
and insights into the difficulty of rapid changes within a complex
University setting.
Two other particularly instructive sections of the oral history
consider, first, the relationship of the division with the legislature and
with the three gubernatorial administrations in office during Kendrick's
tenure; and second, the personnel problems and charges of discrimination in
the Cooperative Extension Service and Kendrick's attempts to reach solutions
in an tense atmosphere.
Kendrick's philosophy in meeting these challenges is expressed in this
passage from his oral history: "I figure if you're going to learn to walk,
take one step at a time. Pretty soon you'll be running. But if you don't
start walking, that just delays the end of the race."
Kendrick's patience, persistance, and good-humored determination have
been displayed throughout his career. He has also displayed them in
fighting and living with cancer for the past several years. During the
course of these interviews for his oral history and during the lengthy and
demanding editing process, his health was variable, but he continued to
focus his energies to produce a thorough and thoughtful history of his
career and of the University's Division of Agriculture and Natural
Resources.
The twelve interview sessions took place from September 2. 1987, to
November 13, 1987, in Mr. Kendrick's home in Berkeley. He reviewed the
transcipt with care, sometimes rewording passages for greater clarity and
conciseness. The memoir was funded by the President's Office of the
University of California. Tapes of the interviews are available in The
Bancroft Library.
Ann Lage
Interviewer/Editor
January 31, 1989
Berkeley, California
Dr. James B. Kendrick,
retired UC official, dies at 68
T7w
BERKELEY - Dr. James B.
Kendrick Jr., formerly vice presi
dent for Agriculture and Natural
Resources at the University of Cali
fornia at Berkeley, died Wednesday
of cancer. He was 68.
Dr. Kendrick retired in June
1986 after nearly 40 years with the
university.
He took a bachelor of arts degree
in botany-genetics from DC-Berke
ley in 1942, and following two years
of military service he took his doc
toral degree in plant pathology
from the University of Wisconsin in
1947.
He joined the staff at UC Riv
erside in 1947 as a plant pathologist
at the Citrus Experiment Station,
and became a professor of plant
pathology and chairman of the
Plant Pathology Department. He
was in 1968 appointed to the new
job of vice president for agricultur
al sciences which became vice
president of Agricultural and Natu
ral Resources, at UC-Berkeley.
He was responsible for coordi
nation of UC's statewide programs
in agricultural research and educa
tion, for the Natural Reserve sys
tem and Cooperative Extension
and 4-H, and he served 16 years on
the State Board of Food and Agri
culture.
Dr. Kendrick was a member of
the executive committee of the Na
tional Association of State Univer
sities and Land-Grant Colleges, a
representative to the Western Re
gional Council of the Joint Council
of Food and Agricultural Sciences,
and until recently chairman of the
Scientific Review Panel on Toxic
Air Contaminants, a nine-member
stat* board.
He was a member of the First
Congregational Church of Berke
ley, and a director of Guide Dogs
for the Blind in San Rafael.
Dr. Kendrick is survived by his
wife, Evelyn, of Berkeley; his
mother, Violet, of Davis; a brother,
E.L. Kendrick, of Tucson, Ariz; a
sister, Elizabeth Gale, of Wood
land; a son, Douglas Kendrick, of
Berkeley; a daughter, Janet Ken
drick, of Davis, and two grandchil
dren, Amber and Shane.
A memorial service will held
Wednesday at 2 p.m. in the First
Congregational Church at 2345
Channing Way.
The family asks that no flowers
be sent, but that donations be made
to the Alta Bates-Herrick Hospice
in Berkeley, or to Guide Dogs for
the Blind in San Rafael.
Obituary
The Tribune, Oakland, California
February 16, 1989
Mr. Kendrick died on February 15, 1989, as his oral history was
being readied for binding. The address by President Gardner at
his memorial service on February 22 has been included in the
appendix.
I EARLY INFLUENCES: FAMILY. COMMUNITY, AND EDUCATION
Parents from Farm Families. South Carolina and Iowa
[Date of Interview: September 2, 1987] ##
Lage: This is Ann Lage interviewing James B. Kendrick, Jr. Do you
still use the "junior"?
Kendrick: Yes, I do. Let me explain the reason for using junior. My
father and I were in the same profession and employed by the same
institution at different locations. I felt that in order to be
identified and prevent confusion, I would preserve the use of
junior as part of my name. So I've done it all these years, even
though he was deceased in 1962.
Lage: That makes sense. You were writing papers in the same field.
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: That's something we'll get into — how you followed in your
father's footsteps.
Today we're going to start with personal background,
especially focusing on how it might have influenced your later
career — policies, decisions, and points of view. Let's start
with your family, your parents.
Kendrick: Well, my parents had their origin in two rather different
locations. My father goes back to South Carolina. He was born
in a rural setting, in a farm setting, in York County near
Clover, South Carolina, which was very close to the border
between South Carolina and North Carolina. The largest major
town where they used to go shopping for major things was
Gastonia, North Carolina.
## This symbol indicates that a tape or segment of a tape has
begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes, see page 386.
Lage: He was raised on the farm?
Kendrick: He was raised on a farm. His father died early, and so he was
raised by an uncle, back in the family home. His mother went
back to the family home. I have a lot of fond memories of
visiting that southern rural society, in terms of how they eeked
out a living on not a very affluent piece of ground.
Lage: About how large was the farm?
Kendrick: I don't remember, but it was several hundred acres, and the usual
kind of cropping of corn and cotton. But my recollections of
that farm are childhood recollections. I don't have a lot of
lasting impressions, except those that you get as a seven, eight,
or ten-year-old because when we moved to California our visiting
back in that setting of South Carolina was very infrequent.
My father was born in 1893, and he ultimately went to
Qemson University. I think there was some delay between getting
out of high school and enrolling in CLemson, but he graduated
from CLemson about 1916.
Lage: And Clemson is in North Carolina?
Kendrick: Qemson is in South Carolina. It is the state's land grant
institution. At the time it was a military men's school. It
should not be confused with the University of South Carolina, but
it is a state institution. Probably known more today because of
its football team than anything else.
After graduating from Clemson, he went to Iowa State. I
think one of the professors whom he was attracted to, or at least
had some courses from at Clemson, was a botanist who arranged to
get him up to Iowa State University for some graduate training.
I think that was about 1917 or 1918. While up there, he went
into the service because of his military training. That was in
World War I, but he never served outside this country. The war
ended soon after he was taken into service as a second
lieutenant.
At any rate, he moved to Iowa — Ames — and enrolled in Iowa
State in a graduate program of applied botany, which led into
plant pathology and an interest in plant diseases. I think sone
of his early graduate assistantships involved summer work
eradicating the barberry, which is an alternate host for wheat
rust. That was a major program in those days to control wheat
rust in that big wheat belt of the Midwest. Wheat rust is an
interesting fungus that requires a different host to complete its
life cycle, and one of the early techniques of control was to
interrupt that life cycle by destroying its alternate host. So
Kendrick: the government employed a lot of young men — I think probably
principally young men at that time — to scour the countrysides and
hoe and cut out the barberries.
Lage: So it was a natural means of control.
Kendrick: It was an early biological control system with the emphasis on
biology.
Dad's major professor at Iowa State was I. E. Melhus, who
was kind of a crusty individual, as I remember. His secretary
was my mother [Violet McDonald].
Lage: Oh I We're getting into the courtship.
Kendrick: She was born in Iowa. Her parents were also farmers. She was
born in Washington County, which I think, as far as I recall, is
down in the southeastern part of the state. But I never knew
that part of her background. By the time I knew my grandparents,
they were resident in the town of Ames. Some time earlier they
had moved from Washington County and were farming property on the
edge of the Iowa State campus. The university had purchased
their farm and farm house in the course of needing, I guess,
additional land to expand. So by the time I was really
acquainted with them, they had located themselves as residents of
Ames, with an address that's vividly fixed in my mind as 926
Grand Avenue. We spent a good deal of time with my mother's
parents — more so than we did with my father's.
Father's Early Career in Plant Pathology
Kendrick: They were married in 1919, and then my father was offered a
position at Purdue University.
Lage: Had he finished his — ?
Kendrick: He had not finished his doctoral program, but I think he had a
master's degree by that time. And so he took the position that
was offered to him at Lafayette, Indiana, at Purdue University.
It was in Lafayette where I appeared, when I was born on the 21st
of October, 1920.
The period of my early life in West Lafayette, where we
lived, I can recall only in snatches, principally by reflecting
on conversations with my parents about those days and looking at
early photographs. My father was, as with most first-born
children, recording every moment that he could and so there are
many early photographs of me.
Kendrick: Most of those early photographs were not taken with a hand-held
camera like I've got where the focus, shutter speed, and exposure
are all automatically set. The photographic sessions were
regular excursions. We would get into a small wagon or walk over
to the laboratory where Dad worked. He'd set up the still camera
and set everything in motion. It was like a photographic studio.
So. it was not just a snapshot. But there were some snapshots,
too. taken on those early Kodak cameras.
I was the only sibling of the family until 1926. when my
sister was born, also in Lafayette.
Lage: Were there other siblings after that?
Kendrick: I have a brother who was born in Woodland after we moved to
California.
During the period that they were in Indiana, Dad sought to
complete the work for his doctorate degree. So he took a leave,
I think, about 1924 or '25, and we went to Ames for a year.
That's why I have more vivid recollections about Ames than some
of the other places in my early life. He completed his work and
received his Ph.D. degree about 1925, I think.
Lage:
In plant pathology?
Kendrick: In plant pathology, from Iowa State University. He minored in
bacteriology.
Then we returned to Lafayette. He had an associate whom he
was working with at Purdue. His name was Max W. Gardner. They
did a lot of their research work together, but I don't think they
did much classroom instruction. Dad didn't hold a professorship,
because his appointment involved mostly full-time research. He
was primarily handling the vegetable problems. I can't really be
certain about these impressions at Purdue because I was less than
seven years old.
Lage: That's all right. We don't expect you to remember —
Kendrick: You don't form a lot of lasting memories at that age.
The Move to Davis, the "University Farm", 1927
Kendrick: In 1927, I remember. Dad had an opportunity, or an offer, to come
to California and locate at Davis to develop a plant pathology
group on the Davis campus. Up to that time, the department was
here at Berkeley in the College of Agriculture. They tried to
Kendrick: provide the needs for plant pathology on the Davis campus by
locating one or two people up there from time to time to teach,
primarily. Ralph E. Smith was chairman of the department at that
time, and also a significant figure in the development of plant
pathology in the University of California. Incidentally, Ralph
Smith was the administrator who really got the Citrus Experiment
Station started back in the early 1900s. Dean [E. J.] Wickson
sent Ralph E. Smith to southern California to establish a
laboratory to take care of lemon rot and a walnut blight problem.
So Ralph E. Smith, the plant pathologist, was the one who got
agricultural research laboratories going in southern California,
but that digresses.
Lage : He saw the need to develop something more active on the Davis
campus, it seems.
Kendrick: Well, he and others, I assume. But it was determined that the
University wanted a group, an extension of the Department of
Plant Pathology at Berkeley, on the Davis campus as it was
developing. And so my father was the one who accepted the
invitation to do that. He remained as the head and chair of that
unit throughout his entire career at the University of
California — thirty-three years, which is something you don't do
nowadays.
Lage: That's right. Longevity that you no longer see very often.
Kendrick: Well, there were a lot of changes that took place over the years.
So they packed up bag and baggage in 1927 and by late summer
of that year, we had moved to Davis to start a new life. I'm
sure at the time it felt like they were moving to the end of the
earth.
Lage: That's what I'm thinking, even though that pattern of movement
from Iowa to Calif ornia wasn1 1 uncommon.
Kendrick: Well, that's true, but it was a long way from South Carolina. My
mother's parents were Ohioans, so they had moved from Ohio to
Nebraska and then back to Iowa. I think they were prospecting
around trying to find a piece of ground that was productive
enough that they could farm and survive.
When we first arrived in Davis we lived for several months
in a few rooms in a little hotel — the University Hotel on 2nd and
"B" Streets. Later that year we moved across the street to a
small house that's still there. And then a couple years later to
a little larger house on "S" Street. In 1930 they built a home
at 35 College Park, a housing development outside of the city
limits, where the University faculty and staff were locating.
Lage : How comfortable could a college professor be at that time or. the
salary of a professor?
I
Kendrick: Well, it was pretty meager.
Lage: In comparison to others in Davis and surrounding areas?
Kendrick: Well, in comparison with others. I never detected that we were
skimping and saving and sacrificing. We never had anything tc
waste, and the humble origins of their parents instilled a
frugality in their attitude that watched the spending pattern
pretty closely. There was a lot of canning of fresh fruit. Both
of them having a farm background where they canned and preserved
and stored food to last the year, that was kind of a way of life
for my mother; she did a lot of preserving and canning. Dad was
an avid gardener; he always had things growing.
My folks bought their first automobile while we were there.
I noted that he bought a Buick; it wasn't a new Buick. but they
bought a Buick. they didn't buy a Model-T Ford. A 1927 Buick was
really quite a car.
So I think that they were living in a style that the rest of
the academic appointees were. But it was a very happy time, I
think, because it was a period of growth of the campus. There
were only five hundred students, and about four hundred and fifty
were in a two-year program called the non-degree program that the
University at a later date [1960] gave to Cal Poly arv.' r^l--1.. "You
take this program because it is not compatible with our long-
range goal." That created a lot of discussion on the campus
because the people who were associated with teaching the two-year
program really felt they were being disadvantaged and disparaged.
But the view prevailed that because the University of California
was a degree-granting institution it really shouldn't continue
the vocational aspect of teaching which characterized the non-
degree program. The Davis campus was known as the University
Farm. It wasn't the "University of California, Davis" at that
time.
Lage: It didn't have the separate status, as I understand.
Kendrick: No, it certainly didn't. It was tied very, very closely to
Berkeley. You couldn't wiggle without getting permission from
people at Berkeley. And that close tie has a lot to do with what
I have observed over the years as the "Davis attitude," relative
to Berkeley or relative to the rest of the University.
Lage:
Should we elaborate on that, or will that come out — ?
Kendrick: Well, I think that will come out later because until I became the
vice-president I really didn't detect the characteristics of the
campuses. Each one is as different and has as much individual
character as children. But there are some lasting kinds of
impressions of the Berkeley-Davis relationship, I think, that
account for a lot of reactions which people have difficulty
explaining; but if you understand the background and you have
been around long enough you can understand them.
Lage: So, whereas maybe you didn't detect it when you were living in
Davis, I'm sure when you were faced with it, you understood it.
Kendrick: That's right. You could make allowances for it and not get your
nose out of joint.
Lage: Your father must have experienced it directly, with his position.
Kendrick: Yes, he did. And he's the origin of a lot of my knowledge and
impressions.
Town and Gown Relationships in Davis
Kendrick: The campus, in those late twenties and early thirties, developed
to a large extent as a family. The leaders of the various
academic units — most of whom have buildings named for them now —
were friends and colleagues of my family, and there was a lot of
esprit de corps and camaraderie. The faculty liked to play
together as well as work together. I can recall spirited
Softball games; they would divide themselves into teams and
leagues and spend the summer playing softball. When that ran
out, they'd play volleyball with teams and a league schedule.
The socializing among the faculty was fairly extensive. One of
the principal indoor sports was card playing — bridge. But the
town of Davis was really dominated by the University. Other than
the presence of the University, Davis's main reason for existing
was that it was the railroad junction between the Southern
Pacific's main line that went east to Chicago and the coast line
that went north to Seattle.
Lage: Nothing else there.
Kendrick: A little supplying of the farm community there, but not
extensive. They had a little downtown section. But if you had
taken the University farm and its activities away from Davis, it
would have just been a railroad stop, with a small supply and
trading center for farmers.
8
Lage : Were your connections mainly with other university-related people
as you grew up, rather than with farmers and their children?
Kendrick: Almost exclusively, because most of my schoolmates whom I can
recall were children of other people employed by the University.
However, I had a close chum through grade school who was the
adopted son of the owner of the principal dry goods and grocery
store in town.
Lage: That was the town and gown relationship?
Kendrick: That was the town and gown relation. [laughter] I used to think
it was really something special being able to go downtown on
Sunday when the store was closed and be given store candy or
other goodies by his mom or grandfather, who would be working
there. It was sort of a back-stage type of experience.
Anyway, my primary group of colleagues came from the campus
community, although I have to modify that statement a bit because
another close chum who had a lot of influence on my life as a
colleague was the grandson of a farmer near Winters. They were a
bright family; the youngsters were very sharp. There were two
boys and a girl in that family, but Gordon Furth was the oldest
one and my chum.
Gordon joined our class, I think, in about the third grade.
I was in the second grade when I started school in Davis. Class
sizes averaged thirty-five students. Gordon's grandfather and
father were farming apricots and walnuts. Even though they were
in the Winters school district, they weren't happy with the
Winters school at that time, so the parents gained permission to
send their children to Davis. That move resulted in a very long-
lasting and endearing friendship because the group of kids I
played with most liked to go to the Furth's ranch from time tc
time and play in that rural setting. But Gordon was a lead horse
in the sense that he seemed to have no problem getting good
grades. The competitive spirit in our group was strong because
we wanted to get better grades than he did. [laughter] So in
that relationship, friendly as it was, it was always trying to
outdo Furth; we couldn't understand why he was so much scarter
than the rest of us.
Lage: There was a value placed on academic achievement, then.
Kendrick: We had a pretty straightforward academic program. But I think
the value system was preserved because so many of the youngsters
were children of University people. There were about a dozen of
us who really watched one another and how well we were doing.
Kendrick: This is kind of a sideline, but back in the third grade — it could
have been the fourth grade — I discovered that Gordon was reading
Time magazine from covei to cover, and I can recall thinking,
"Why on earth at an age of about nine or ten, in the fourth
grade, was he reading that magazine from cover to cover?" It
wasn't until years later I discovered that his uncle was the
managing editor of Time magazine. [laughter]
Lage: So he wasn't a typical farmboy.
Kendrick: I don't know what you mean by typical farmboy, but Gordon was
certainly far above average in intelligence.
Lage: Now, what did he go on to do?
Kendrick: After Gordon graduated from high school at Davis he went to
Berkeley. He became a certified public accountant and gained an
M.B.A. He has had a marvelously successful career in managing
shipping and mining companies. One of his successful
responsibilities was with Cypress Mining Company.
H
Kendrick: Let's skip ahead a little bit. Gordon was the person I selected
as the best man at our wedding, so it has been a long and
enduring relationship.
He has a famous brother, too. Alan Furth, who was about two
years younger than the two of us, was general counsel for the
Southern Pacific Company and one of the chief executives of that
operation. So it was a family of successes.
Lage: I suppose having a Davis campus there had quite an effect on
them, too; without it, they may not have achieved —
Kendrick: Well, I'm not sure the Davis campus had that much influence;
certainly they had enough native intelligence to succeed no
matter where they were going. The interesting thing was that the
parents saw that they were receiving less challenging instruction
in Winters than they would have in Davis. The fact that they
were thrown in amongst youngsters who were from University
background parents, I suppose, had some stimulating effect.
Religion and Politics in the Kendrick Family
Lage: Are there other things about the Davis setting or the family
values? We're interested in religion, politics, that kind of
thing. Does that have a bearing on your course?
10
Kendrick: Well, neither one had any real twig-bending influences on my
points of view about one thing or another. I think I did the
usual; I went to Sunday school regularly and then youth
fellowship — it was called Christian Endeavor in those days. When
I got a little older and into the teenage years, Christian
Endeavor met Sundays evenings, so it provided another opportunity
for a night out with my teenage friends. The sponsors gave soce
great parties [chuckles] so we had a lot of fun. It was a small,
social, Protestant experience. Only a few of my classmates were
Catholics. The only difference noted was that my Catholic
classmates wouldn't eat meat on Fridays, and they would sacrifice
something they ordinarily ate or did during Lent. Aside from
that, the religious influences were not dominant, and they
certainly were not a source of discrimination.
Lage: Was politics a discussed subject? Here we are recalling the
Depression years as you were growing up.
Kendrick: Yes. During the Depression years was one of the times I recall
the University faculty took a salary cut. And that was kir.d of a
tense time. It ultimately got restored, but I don't think
anybody ever caught up. I recall overhearing conversations on
how my parents were really going to have to tighten up. So it
was a time of real belt tightening. Of course, my folks built
their home in College Park — a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home in
a choice piece of real estate — for about $6,000. They bought the
property, which amounts to two lots, for five hundred dollars.
This was in 1930.
My mother still lives in the house she and Dad built on that
property. The percentage appreciation that has taken place over
this period is almost obscene. Similar homes and property in
College Park are now selling for several hundred thousand
dollars, presumably because of the choice location. The
appreciation in most cases is in excess of 3000 percent.
Lage: Was the New Deal accepted by your family?
Kendrick: I don't ever recall hearing a lot of discussion. There could
have been conflict in my family because my mother had a
conservative Republican background and my father had a Democratic
background. Mother never seemed to be very assertive in terms of
her politics. She also came from a strict Methodist family where
Sunday was a quiet church-dominated day. There were no cards in
my grandparents' home. My father was a smoker, and so was one of
my mother's brothers. The use of tobacco was also regarded as a
sin by my maternal grandmother. I remember times when my father
and uncle would go down to the basement to smoke. I don't know
why they thought that was avoiding the obvious because the smoke
would come ou through the house. 1 guess they felt they could
11
Kendrick: get out of "smell-shot" in the basement. At least it had a coal-
like smell because there was lots of coal stored in the basement,
which was used to heat the house.
Although my father was a Democrat, I can't recall whether he
thought Roosevelt was a real savior or not. His work ethic, I
think, was such that he was not terribly sympathetic with some of
the welfare society programs. But I think he generally was a
supporter of Roosevelt because the country needed a change.
There was never really a lot of political discussion in our home.
Lage: One of those things best not discussed at some point.
Kendrick: I think part of it was my mother's attitude. She just didn't
care to engage in that kind of a discussion. So their political
background really didn't have any impact. As a matter of fact,
my father's politics didn't influence me because I've been a
registered Republican all my life. I think the reason I
registered Republican is that by the time I got ready to vote,
the Republican candidates appealed to me more than the Democratic
candidates, so I became a Republican. And you couldn't really
determine from my voting record through the years exactly what
party I affiliated with.
Lage: So you were more independent, even though you registered
Republican?
Kendrick: I registered Republican just to have a party, but I —
Lage: Just to be contrary in Berkeley, I suspect. [laughs]
Kendrick: Yes, I feel disenfranchised in Berkeley. Being a Republican is
probably a useless registration in Berkeley. But my leanings
tend to be a little more conservative than liberal, although I
think that it's really a pick-and-choose attitude. No party
label really satisfies me. It depends on the issue whether I'm a
conservative or a liberal. I can't buy all the liberal causes,
and I can't buy all the conservative causes.
Schooling: Academics, Athletics, and Evelyn
Lage:
Kendrick
You talked a little bit about schooling-
there any early interest in academics?
-not in depth — but was
In elementary school in Davis, I recall that I was just a little
better than average as a student. I worked like a demon to try
and match Gordon, but I was never able to do so. There were a
couple of smart girls in my class also, and I couldn't catch up
12
Kendrick: with them either. They were daughters of University faculty
fathers. Probably no more than half of the class members were
from University families, and it was a good, competitive class.
Ultimately, thirty-eight of us graduated from high school. For
those interested in numerology, it is interesting to observe that
the thirty-eight members in the class graduated in the year of
1938, fifty years ago next year, which seems like a long, long
time ago.
I recall that my parents were strict about my paying
attention to grades, and if I slipped down and got a C or a D in
a subject, we visited the teacher to find out why. Those were
not particularly pleasant occasions, and I was subject to
corporal punishment at home. My mother didn't spank; my father
believed that a good tanning would straighten out the thinking,
fairly easily. So I had my share of spankings.
Lage: This kind of academic achievement was definitely encouraged at
home.
Kendrick: It certainly was. No excuse for not doing your best, which, I
would say, left a lasting impression. I came to believe early ir.
school that if it was worth the time, it was worth giving your
best to do it. I guess I developed a perfectionist attitude.
Life really began to open up for me in junior high school —
seventh and eighth grade. My seventh and eighth grade classes
were in the high school building. We were kind of like a second
thumb on the hand, but at least we were in the environment of the
high school. We had a very good physical education instructor
who was also the high school athletic coach — coach of everything.
His name is Dewey Halden, and he is still living. Dewey would
spend his time in the gymnasium on the weekends. He made it
available to all youngsters in Davis who otherwise might be
running around and getting into trouble. Dewey organized
basketball games with other schools so from about the seventh
grade on the world of athletics became more important than
anything else, as far as I was concerned. His encouragement of
this early athletic development was not all altruism. He liked
to win. [laughter] And his high school football and basketball
teams usually won their conference titles.
Lage: But he just was working on the junior high level?
Kendrick: He was working with these kids — seventh and eighth graders —
getting them started in a competitive, organized sporting event,
largely basketball, but also a little touch football. The senior
minister of our community church was a big, tall fellow, who had
a more than passing interest in basketball. His name was the
Reverend Williams, and Pewey asked him to help coach a team of
13
Ken d rick :
Lage:
Ken d rick:
Lage:
Ken d rick:
junior high school youngsters. I was part of that group. That
was my earliest exposure to competitive athletics, and I thought
life was really going to be fun and games.
So the seventh and eighth grade passed in due course without
any lasting impression except these years opened up a new world
other than one which was strictly academic. Even though Davis
High School then had a relatively small student body and served
a district outside of the city limits, it offered a wide range of
extracurricular activities. The school also took great pride in
the fact that it graduated a significant number of youngsters who
went on to college and who were automatically accepted into the
University of California. Since it had a reputation to maintain,
it conducted a rigorous academic program, too.
And did the athletics continue in high school?
They sure did.
Did you play basketball?
I felt during most of my high school career that the most
important part of the day began about two o'clock — after I
finished with my formal classes. I played football and
basketball, and since we didn't have a baseball team that
amounted to anything, because Dewey Halden didn't seem to be
interested in baseball, we had track and field. It was on the
track field where I developed some degree of individual skill,
but we'll get to that in a moment. I really enjoyed playing
football. I played football from the time that I was a freshman
until I graduated, and managed to get through without doing any
more damage to myself than breaking a front tooth, I played in
the back field all of the time, and our teams were quite good.
We won our league championship most of the time, although we
couldn't advance very much further than that because the bigger
schools just beat up on us. But we were kings in our own league.
I played regularly in the back field on the team from my
sophomore year on.
Basketball was fun, and I enjoyed it also. It was easier to
match comparable skills because our teams were divided into A, B,
and C groups, depending on the athletes' age, height, and weight.
In track I seemed to be a reasonably springy runner, so I
high- jumped and hurdled. My junior year was the best year of my
track achievement. I had developed a capacity to run the high
hurdles better than most people in northern California, so I won
most of the races that year. I can recall coming home from the
first invitational meet, in my junior year, on a Saturday
afternoon. "My father said, "Well, how did you do?" And I said,
"I won two races." "Well, I'll be damned," he said. [laughter]
Kendrick: I think both of us were surprised that I had any kind of ability
to do that because I was not physically constructed to run the
high hurdles very well. In spite of being shorter than most
hurdlers, I had developed a technique to get over them rapidly
without much waste motion. Dad and mother were avid followers of
my high school athletic program. They seldom missed a football
or a basketball game or a track meet in which I participated.
It was my junior year when I won the northern California
high hurdle championship, which qualified me to go to the
California state meet. This was quite an honor because Davis had
not qualified more than one or two people for the state meet ever
before. Dewey Halden and I traveled to Long Beach for the meet,
and it was a thrill of my young life to go down there with my
coach. I found out that I was going to be racing with some of
the same people I had been beating all year. However, I was to
experience one of life's most humbling lessons. I stumbled on
the first hurdle in the opening heat and didn't qualify for the
final race. It was a bitter disappointment that I had to endure
because the young man who I had been beating in every race all
year came in second in the finals.
Lage: So you felt you could have been first —
Kendrick: Well, not first. The winner was clearly much better and more
outstanding than anybody else. But I figured that I would have a
cinch second. That was an important event in my life, because I
had to deal with defeat caused by subpar performance rather than
losing because of being outclassed.
Lage: This was in '37?
Kendrick: In 1937. The athletic program was good, but that was not all of
the extracurricular offerings. Davis High had a whole range of
activities; we had a drama program, an orchestra, a chorus,
student government, and a publications group, which published a
monthly student paper and the annual.
Lage: How large would the school have been?
Kendrick: We had about 150 students. Four classes — four grades — and about
150 students.
Lage: That's small.
Kendrick: What it meant was that each of us did everything. When football
season ended, we put away the football uniforms and then we
became basketball players; and when basketball season ended, we
put those uniforms away and became the track squad. In addition,
we squeezed in the extra time for ;lrama, chorus, orchestra,
student council, student government, and publications. I
15
Kendrick: participated in all of these, so I had a high school that was
busy from morning until night. It was a rich, enjoyable
experience and a lot of fun.
Lage: And the academics kept up?
Kendrick: Well, surprisingly, the academics improved. I got through high
school with a pretty good record — not the best in the class, that
belonged to Gordon Furth, but it was pretty good. All of the C's
and D's disappeared, and the A's and B's came back because I
studied. Good grades didn't come all that easy for me. To
compensate I would devote my weekends to studying my course work
a week ahead so that I would have the freedom of the evenings and
the afternoons to pursue the athletics and other activities. I
worked during spare times and in the summers by watering people's
lawns or taking care of their animals when they were on vacation
to accumulate some spending money. My main source of
recreational funds was gained by working at the University during
summers. Dad always provided the basic necessities of food and
clothing for the children. So all I needed was spending money.
I have not yet mentioned that the most positive influence in
my life occurred in high school; Evelyn joined my class in 1934.
Her maiden name was Evelyn Henle.
Lage: So Evelyn goes way back, too.
Kendrick: She goes way back, too. She came from a farming family that
farmed dryland grain between Winters and Davis, a little closer
to Davis than Winters, so she automatically qualified for the
Davis Unified School District. Her father's name was Albert
Ludwig Henle, and her mother's name was Lura Wicks Henle. Her
first eight years of school were spent in a one-room, fully
integrated, multiple-classed school that was named the Fairf ield
School. The only teacher in this school was the wife of Dewey
Halden, my high school athletic coach. [laughter] Davis had a
population of about one thousand when we moved there in 1927, so
it should not have been surprising to find many close
relationships among people with whom we came in contact in that
community.
Lage: It was an interesting community, though, with a population of one
thousand; but with the presence of a university, it must not have
been the typical small town.
Kendrick: You are right, it gave it a special character. During most of my
high school period, Evelyn was merely a classmate. It was about
the end of our senior year when we began to see one another with
a little more serious intent than just dating for a party. I
liked many of the girls and wasn't about to be serious about any
16
Kendrick: particular one for a while. By the time that we had graduated I
stopped dating other girls, and we had a steady relationship from
then on.
The spring of 1938 — the year we graduated from high school —
her father had a farm accident. A disc rolled back on his leg,
and it had to be amputated. That event disrupted her plans to go
on to college; she had to go to work and provide some
remuneration for herself as well as for her family. She went to
work in the Bank of Davis as a teller/ clerk. So, during the
period that I was an undergraduate student at Berkeley, she was
working in Davis at the Bank of Davis.
Lage : Had she intended to go on to Berkeley, also?
Kendrick: I don't know. She probably had intended to go on to school in
Davis where her older sister, Lura Alleyne, had gone.
I can't recall any particular occasion when we reached a
decision to marry each other, but we sort of knew it would work
into that relationship eventually. We were married about a week
after I graduated from Berkeley, on May 17, 1942, in a lovely
ceremony held in the yard of her family home on the farm. Guess
who was my best man? Gordon Furth was again an important part of
my life. However, this time I came out ahead of him. Gordon had
also been a student at Berkeley.
Entering UC Berkeley. 1938; Bowles Hall Resident
Lage:
Kendrick:
Let's turn now to your experience at Berkeley.
choose Berkeley?
Why did you
Well, my choice for Berkeley really was made on the basis of
looking briefly at three schools: one was Davis, and there was
Stanford and Berkeley. I w as attracted to Stanford but realized
it was pretty impractical because of the expense. I was not
offered any scholarships, so it looked like a little too much of
a financial obligation for my parents. Berkeley was the choice
because I didn't want to go to Davis. I felt that the close
friendships that existed between faculty members and my high
school notoriety was not going to allow me to stand on my own
feet, so I chose Berkeley. I also recognized the fact that it
was regarded as an achievement to get into Berkeley. I had
managed to pass the Subject A examination, which was a surprise
to some people, including me, but nevertheless gratefully
accepted.
If
17
Ker.drick: The other thing that made coming to Berkeley attractive was my
acceptance as a resident of Bowles Hall as a freshman. There
were only a few freshmen admitted to Bowles at that time. The
policy in those days was different than it is today because once
you were admitted, you stayed as long as you were enrolled as an
undergraduate if you wanted to. Bowles was a living arrangement
that had no rival, in my judgment.
Lage: Did you know about it in advance?
Kendrick: Yes, I did, because Rose Gilmore was the resident manager. Her
husband w as a professor on the Davis campus. I think that fact
helped a bit in being selected, because there was lots of
competition for acceptance. It was almost like applying for a
scholarship. It was necessary to secure recommendations from
reliable people. That first year my roommate was Gene Ireland.
There was a bit of irony in this situation because Gene went to
school in Winters. I knew him slightly in high school because we
opposed one another in our athletic contests.
At Berkeley, I enrolled in the premed major, as did Gene, so
we started down the same academic path in Bowles Hall as
roommates. Bowles was constructed so each resident had a private
bedroom with a larger room between the two private bedrooms which
was used as a common living room. So, two of us had three rooms.
All of the rooms on the front of the building had fabulous views
of the Bay Area and San Francisco. As freshmen, however, we had
back rooms, and we had to wait for our seniority to grow before
we could progress to the view-rooms.
Lage: The living arrangements were luxurious compared to today's
standards.
Kendrick:
Lage :
Kendrick:
You could never find that kind of living accommodations from
University housing today. The other thing that made it
attractive was the food service. All the meals were prepared in
the hall's own kitchen, and they were fabulous, good as well as
generous.
The hall was relatively new then, wasn't it?
built in the thirties.
I thought it was
I think it was relatively new.
shape than it is today.
It was certainly in much better
Professor [James D.] Hart donated money to build a library
as a memorial to his parents while I was there. He also stocked
it with a basic collection of representative literature. It was
a magnificent addition to the living quarters. Another
remembrance of Bowles was the quality of the student residents,
who later became quite well known and successful. At the time,
18
Kendrick: however, they were just ordinary classmates, or at least that was
the way it seemed to me. I knew very little about most of their
backgrounds, although I knew there were a lot of San Franciscans
in various classes. My Bowles classmates included Peter Kaas,
Eugene Kilgore, Bill Coblentz, Dan Koshland, Dick Goldman, Stan
McCaffrey, and Jim Schwabacher, to name only a very few who
became prominent in later life.
Lage: What was the line between Bowles people and fraternity people?
Kendrick: There was no line. We were part of the "non-org's" — organized
non-org's. We engaged in a fair amount of campus politics. We
had some campus politicians among us, but none, following Stan
McCaffrey, during my years at Bowles succeeded in being elected
to the presidency [of the Associated Students]. We ran
candidates for the student council and various other elective
offices. Our candidates tended to affiliate with the
fraternities' candidates. We would canvas the frats and try to
make alliances so that we were treated a bit like a fraternity.
However, we were never really accepted as a fraternity. For ore
thing, there were 108 of us; we were larger than all of the
frats. Secondly, the Bowles students did not participate 1 .
selecting the members of the hall. I visited
fraternities and had friends in a few houses, but I was never
seriously tempted to move from Bowles. No physical living
situation could match that of Bowles Hall, and the companionship
at Bowles seemed as good as the alternatives. The environment at
Bowles also encouraged good scholarship, to which by that time I
was committed. Another thing that changed my attitude about
fraternity life was my interest in Evelyn. I wasn't really
looking for opportunities for a heavy social life. The social
program at Bowles Hall was active enough for most of us. Evelyn
would come to Berkeley for the appropriate events, so I always
had a date when I wanted one.
Lage: How did you choose the premed program?
Kendrick: I really don't know. I think the attractiveness of practicing
medicine seemed glamorous to me. I realized also that it was a
respected and rewarding profession, both monetarily and self-
satisfying. I think I saw it as a means of establishing a
successful relationship with members of a small community. So
medicine seemed to be where I wanted to dedicate my life.
Eugene Ireland, my first roommate, became a pediatrician.
He established his practice in Santa Monica. I had four
different roommates during my residency in Bowles. One of them
was another premed named Jack Dykes, now deceased, who was a
thoracic surgeon who practiced in Bakersf ield. He went to
medical school at Northwestern University. I roomed with him
during our sophomore year. Then I roomed one year with Bob Crum,
19
Kendrick: one of my Davis High School classmates, who came from a farm
family near Winters. My senior year I roomed with another farm
boy named Latane Sale, pronounced "Latnee." He was from a farm
near Red Bluff.
Undergraduate Education from Top Faculty Members
Kendrick: I stuck with the premed program for two years. Premeds generally
took the same courses, and class sections tended to group
students depending on where they ranked in the class. I found
myself generally grouped with the top-ranked students.
I seemed to have caught the fire of academic stick-to-itiveness
by that time, so I spent a lot of time studying very diligently;
the grades responded correspondingly. My undergraduate education
was really quite good. For a general science background, the
premed program couldn't have been better suited. I was in the
College of Letters and Science, which gave me an opportunity to
pursue a bachelor of arts degree. It also gave me a chance to
take history and English and a number of electives. My
undergraduate instructors were all well known members of
Berkeley's faculty in later years, just the way it ought to be
nowadays, but it isn't. I had chemistry 1A-B from Professor
[Joel] Hildebrand and organic chemistry from Professor [C. W.]
Porter, quantitative analysis from Professor [Wendell M.] Latimer
and English was from Professor James D. Hart, now with The
Bancroft Library. He was just starting out on his faculty
career. He is the Professor Hart who gave the memorial library
to Bowles Hall while I was a resident there.
My zoology 1A instructor was Professor [Sol] Light, and then
in spring of that year there was a brand new assistant professor
by the name of Richard Eakin, who taught my zoology IB. I took
plant physiology from Professor A. R. Davis, and history of
western civilization from Professor Herbert Bolton.
Lage : You had quite a background.
Kendrick: In zoology I took a course from the famous geneticist Professor
[Richard] Goldschmidt, and in botany I had a good course in
genetics from Professor [T. Harper] Goodspeed. By the beginning
of my junior year I was becoming disillusioned — not with
medicine, but with my student colleagues who were headed into
medicine. Even in those days, it was a cut-throat operation. I
said if these are the kinds of people who are going into
medicine, I'm not so sure that I want to continue in medicine. I
was really disillusioned about what you had to do to get the
grades to get into med school.
20
Lage:
Highly competitive.
Kendrick: Yes. And I didn't feel that it ought to be that way.
Lage:
Even though you, yourself, were getting good grades.
Kendrick: Oh, I was getting adequate grades, I think they would have been
considered as acceptable. I just didn't like what I saw.
At about this same period of disillusionment with the pretned
"crowd," my father said to me one day, "I think that any well
educated person should have at least a minimal knowledge of
botany — plants." And I said to myself, "Well, he's supporting me
in school, the least I can do is take one or two courses that he
thinks are important." I think I showed a certain amount of
maturity and wisdom. [laughter] So I took a botany course in my
j unior year.
Lage: Who was the professor then?
Kendrick: I don't remember who gave that beginning botany course. I can
remember plant physiology being taught by Professor A. R. Davis,
and it may have been that Davis was the first teacher I had for
botany. There was a laboratory that went with it, and even
though it wasn't a piece of cake, it was no problem. The grades
came easily. And then I became attracted to genetics, so I
started taking all the genetics courses I could find.
Lage: Was this plant genetics, or just — ?
Kendrick: Just any genetics. There weren't all that many courses offered
in those years, anyway.
Lage: Genetics must have been a very different thing from what it is
now.
Kendrick: Oh, indeed it was. Then it was mating plants and figuring out
the characteristics of inheritance, studying the phases of cell
division, and observing the actions of chromosomes. It was still
a young science, so it didn't have a lot of background
information relative to other fields of botany. The genetics
department was in the College of Agriculture, and it was there I
came in contact with Professor [Ernest E.] Babcock, Professor
[Roy] Clausen. Dr. [Everett] Dempster, and another beginning
assistant professor, G. Ledyard Stebbins, who later moved to
Davis. His specialty was the study of evolution of plants.
There are a lot of interesting stories about him. He was just as
eccentric as an assistant professor as he continued to be all the
rest of his career. He was fun. We never really knew where we
were in his course because he never gave us an examination until
the final. [laughter] So he was a mystery.
21
Kendrick: I took all the genetics courses that were offered by that
department. It was a field that really interested me. Now. when
I decided as a junior that I was not going to go on to premed, I
began looking around at majors which would allow me to graduate
in the four years that I had thought I was going to devote to my
undergraduate career. I was also getting fairly serious about
wanting to get married at the end of this period, and I really
didn't see my pursuit of medicine as offering a lot of
opportunity to be married while attending med school. That also
had a certain amount of influence on my decision to change
majors. I discovered, with the help of Professor Adriance
Foster, who was a botanist and my advisor, that there was a major
called general curriculum, which seemed to fit what I needed.
General curriculum was a major which required thirty-six upper
division units spread among three subjects with a limit of no
more than twenty units in any one subject. I had taken or
planned to take a number of courses in botany, zoology and
genetics, in following my interest in genetics, so I spread my
general curriculum program among those three subjects.
In later years it was always a little difficult to explain
when I was asked what my major was. When I replied, "general
curriculum," the reply generally was, "Well, what's that?"
[laughter] We'll get into another interesting episode as we get
into my military career, which is related to my undergraduate
major. But it fit what I needed to a tee, so I filled out my
undergraduate years with courses in botany, zoology, and
genetics, having already satisfied the English and history
requirements for the Letters and Science general education
requirement, I devoted the rest of my undergraduate years to
getting a good education. During this time I also took some
entomology and mycology, in anticipation of my graduate school
program.
Lage: Were many of these subjects in the College of Agriculture?
Kendrick: The mycology and the genetics courses were. I also was
stimulated into good performance by the fact that a few courses I
took were heavily dominated by graduate students.
Let's digress a little bit. In the late thirties, graduate
students began to enroll at Davis in plant pathology and my
father, characteristic of his relationship with his faculty and
staff, treated them like family. In those early days, plant
pathology at Davis had only one or two graduate students, and
they were incorporated into the department as part of the family.
One of those early graduate students was Jack Oswald, who came to
Davis from De Pauw University in Indiana. Jack didn't work
directly with my father, but he had a close relationship with him
because Dad was the grand patron of that department. Jack was a
very smart and talented young man who had had an illustrious
22
Kendrick: career as an undergraduate. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa,
selected to the academic Ail-American football team, full of fun
and very naive. So he was the brunt of a lot of practical jokes.
In those days you could not get all of the courses you needed for
the Ph.D. degree majors at Davis; you had to enroll at Berkeley
to take some courses. One of the years that Jack was in Berkeley
was my junior year. Because I had not yet completed Botany 1A.
which was a prerequisite for all courses in botany except one
course, I wound up that year taking Botany 1A and a plant
biochemistry course offered by Professor [Dennis R.] Hoagland,
whose lab instructor was Dr. [William Z.] Hassid — another famous
name in the annals of plant physiology and plant biochemistry.
Jack Oswald and Bob [Robert N.] Colwell. who was ultimately a UC
Berkeley professor in the School of Forestry, were in that plant
biochemistry course.
I worked closely with Jack Oswald in later years, so let me
elaborate on his career for a minute. Jack Oswald finished his
degree program at the University of California about 1942; he got
his Ph.D. and immediately enlisted in the navy. He became an
officer in the navy, ultimately assigned to the PT boats. In the
later years of his service career he was commander of a squadron
of PT boats and had a pretty harrowing experience in the war.
He came back after the war and joined the faculty of the plant
pathology department at Davis. After Max Gardner's retirement,
my father became the chairman of the department when the chair
moved to Davis. Nobody exchanged positions, but the chairmanship
did. My father asked Jack Oswald if he would move to Berkeley
and become the assistant chair for the Berkeley campus, which he
did; and he then began to exert a certain amount of independence,
somewhat to the consternation of my father. But therein lies
this Berkeley-Davis relationship that we will get into later.
Jack, being a self-starter and a participant, became noticed
by the dean and then by the Chancellor's Office. He subsequently
was asked to assist dark Kerr as one of the assistant chancell
ors. Then when Clark became the president of the University,
Jack moved with Clark as a special assistant to the president and
handled the Regents' meetings' agenda, etc. Jack then moved from
the University of California to the University of Kentucky as
president, where he served for about eight or ten years. He got
a little tired of Kentucky politics and rejoined the University
of California with President Charles Hitch, who appointed me as
the vice-president of Agricultural Sciences, as it was known at
the time, and Jack Oswald as his executive vice-president. Jack
was in that position for only about a year or year and a half and
then went to Penn State University as its president, where he
served a good fifteen years. He retired as president a couple of
years ago. He has been a recognized success in academic
leadership in university circles. Jack has been a close
colleague and family friend throughout our respective careers.
23
Ker.drick: Now, back to college. I was able, through a little influence by
my father and Dr. Max Gardner, to take that plant biochemistry
course, which I really had no business taking at that point, but
I needed a botany course and that was the only one available to
me which didn't have a botany prerequisite. So I found myself
with about twenty graduate students. I think I was the only
undergraduate in the course, and I worked like a beaver.
Professor Hoagland used to come in at twelve o'clock. It
was a one-to-two o'clock lecture and a two-to-five o'clock lab,
two or three times a week. Hoagland used to come to the
classroom and begin to cover the blackboards with data, tables,
and figures, and during his lecture he would refer to them. It
soon occurred to both Jack Oswald and me that if we wanted to
make any sense out of our lecture notes, we had to get to the
class about the same time as Professor Hoagland and start copying
all of the information as he was writing it on the blackboards.
Well, I worked hard, survived, and got an A out of the course; so
it was a worthwhile experience. But it was another one of the
challenges to stay up with my colleagues, and I never really was
comfortable coming in second.
Lage: [laughs] I can see this competitive streak in you coming out.
Kendrick: I really liked to be up front.
My undergraduate education at Berkeley was first class,
offered by giants in their field. They will remain lasting
impressions on me as well as, apparently, lasting impressions on
their colleagues because they were all honored and identified as
significant figures. I felt that my four years in that program
in the College of Letters and Science was really a gift.
Another thing I liked about my undergraduate years was the
old Berkeley semester schedule which Berkeley has returned to. I
liked that schedule because if your finals fell right in the fall
semester, there were six weeks beween semesters which were
available for work. One year I swept the library at the Davis
campus. I had all kinds of odd jobs during my undergraduate
years which provided me with enough cash for my social schedule
needs during the spring.
Lage: It does make sense. I guess other people think so, too, since
the campus has returned to that schedule.
Kendrick: It's easier to organize a course of instruction in the longer
term than the shorter quarter term. I participated in the
conversion from the semester to the quarter system at Riverside
and saw many courses abused when their instructors modified the
schedule of presentation rather than changing the course to fit
the quarter term schedule.
24
Kendrick: The one big surprise of my last undergraduate year occurred when
I returned to Bowles Hall one spring afternoon and found a notice
in my mailbox informing me that I had been elected to Phi Beta
Kappa. I hadn't the foggiest notion that I had qualified or
whether I was even being considered for membership. But it was &
thrill. It made all the hard work, study, and competitiveness
worth it.
Going to Mecca:
Plant Pathology
Choosing Wisconsin for Graduate Studies in
Kendrick: I went to Wisconsin the fall of 1942. I had earlier determined
that Wisconsin was where I wanted to go to school and that was
largely through the influence of my father, who knew where the
outstanding departments of plant pathology were.
Lage: We haven't really talked about how you decided on plant
pathology.
Kendrick: No, we haven't. It was not really a very sudden decision on my
part because I had had a fair amount of exposure to the subject
in my Davis school years when I would go to the field with my
father and see the kinds of things that he was doing. Then while
wondering what I might do with the major in general curriculum, I
figured that Dad's life had been pretty rewarding and
satisfactory, and since I was interested in genetics and plant
breeding and diseases, I thought I might as well pursue plant
pathology too.
Lage: What about the decision to go on to graduate school?
Kendrick: There was never a doubt.
Lage: Never a doubt? You had been thinking about it with medicine, of
course.
Kendrick: No, there was never a question about stopping with a bachelor's
program. I seemed destined to go as far as the academic
offerings were available, whether it was in medicine or a Ph.D.
program. I had determined that what I really wanted to do was
affiliate with a university, once I had made the decision not to
go into medicine. You're not going to do that with only a
bachelor's degree; you are going to do it with an advanced
degree.
25
Kendrick: There is another event that had a major influence on my career.
I mentioned that my father went to Purdue to work with Max
Gardner, and they became collaborators and colleagues. Bad was
looking ahead in the early 1930s to when Ralph Smith would retire
from the University as chairman of the plant pathology
department, which included Davis at the time. I know Dad was
instrumental in getting Max to move to Berkeley in 1932 in the
Department of Plant Pathology, where they resumed their
collaborative relationship. When Professor Smith retired in
1936, Dad supported Max Gardner as the logical candidate for that
chairmanship. I guess he was able to get Max's name into
consideration because the man who ultimately made all the
decisions in those days, Dean Claude B. Hutchison, made the
appointment in 1936. Max Gardner held that chairmanship until he
retired in 1954.
Lage:
Well, my dad and Max continued this very close personal
friendship and relationship the rest of their lives. I didn't
have a godfather, but if there had been anybody who was my
godfather. Max Gardner would have been the one. He often told of
"hand-holding" my father during the night of my birth, so that
goes back a long way. Margaret Gardner, Max's widow, still lives
in their home here on Hawthorne Terrace. She is hard of hearing
and cannot see well, but she is a spry ninety- two-year- old person
who is a marvel. They raised two children, and they both became
physicians. Murray H. Gardner is at Davis now in the department
of medicine and veterinary medicine working on AIDS of rhesus
monkeys. Mary Frances is in San Antonio, I think. She and her
husband, also a physician, raised a family, most of whom became
doctors too.
But the close relationship that my father and Max maintained
all their life — there is a picture of the two of them right there
[indicating a photograph] in front of Hilgard — was one that I
felt very warm about. Whenever Dad would come to Berkeley for
his business I would make arrangements to get down and visit with
him briefly in Max's office. So plant pathology sort of wrapped
itself around me by osmosis as much as any calculated decision to
pursue it as a profession.
But your interest definitely lay there, in related fields, at
least.
Kendrick: Well, I felt comfortable working with plants. I spent my summers
assisting the plant breeders in the agronomy and pomology
departments at Davis and that gave me a boost in genetics, too.
I liked seeing what would happen when you made crosses and then
analyzed the progeny data. This gave me an early statistical
exposure. We had to analyze the data to see if we were dealing
with something real or imagined. So, almost from the time I
entered high school I was familiar with plant experiments. It
26
Kendrick : may have been different if my father had been an animal
scientist — I may have gone on in animal science; but it was
plants that I was interested in and felt a certain degree of
confidence dealing with.
Max Gardner and my father were quite familiar with the
graduate program in plant pathology of Wisconsin and thought
highly of it. In plant pathology there was Cornell and Minnesota
or Wisconsin, and after those three, well, the rest of then were
in a different rank order.
Lage: What about UC?
Kendrick: Not at that time. It was not that eminent.
Cornell, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had three giants that
stood out as patriarchs in the field. At Wisconsin it was L. R.
Jones, at Minnesota it was E. C. Stakeman, and at Cornell it was
H. H. Whetzel. L. R. Jones had a number of students who went or.
to become pioneers in plant pathology in various departments in
the U.S. One thing Wisconsin did well was place their students
all over the U.S. and these graduates would send their good
students to Wisconsin; for these students was sort of like going
to Mecca. Minnesota graduates did the same thing for Minnesota,
and Cornell graduates were equally loyal to Cornell. But L. R.
Jones was the patriarch of four eminent people in their own
right: James Dickson, George Keitt, J. C. Walker, and Joyce
Riker. These four men split their plant pathology interests by
commodities. Keitt was a fruit tree pathologist, Riker was a
bacteriologist and a forest pathologist, Dickson was a cereal and
forage crop specialist, and J. C. Walker was a vegetable
pathologist.
My father and Max Gardner recommended that I study with J.
C. Walker, so that's where I wound up. I was offered a Wisconsin
Alumni Research Foundation [WARF] fellowship amounting to six
hundred dollars for the year; but all of the fees were included,
so it was worth more than just the six hundred dollars. The six
hundred dollars just paid the rent.
Lage: Did you get married on that?
Kendrick: Oh, yes. The pioneer spirit. [laughter] We had planned that
Evelyn, with her banking experience, would go to work, but her
full-time job paid her the magnificent sum of seventy-five
dollars a month. On that, with my sixty dollars a month and with
all the fees taken care of, we managed to survive pretty well.
Our rent was about fifty dollars a month.
Lage: You could get by on a lot less then.
27
Kendrick: We didn't indulge in any extravagances, but we didn't feel that
we were suffering or sacrificing. I have to mention that the
board and room fee at Bowles Hall, during the four years that I
was there, started out as fifty dollars a month. During the last
year I think it got up to fifty-five.
So the fall of '42, with gas rationing and tires
unavailable — after being married in May and working during the
summer, saving as much as we could in order to pay the apartment
rent in Davis for three months, scrounging as many old tires
(that still had a little tread left on them) as we could — we
bundled ourselves and possessions into Evelyn's 1937 Dodge coupe
and headed for Wisconsin.
Lage: That must have been an adventure in itself. [laughter]
Kendrick: It was. Good thing we didn't know what was ahead of us or we
would not have had enough gumption to go. Life has been an
adventure ever since.
f*
28
II GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AND WARTIME
SERVICE, 1942-1947
Brother's Parallel Path in Plant Pathology
Kendrick: Well. I've got some things that I think we overlooked in our
first session. I need to comment a little bit more about my
sister and brother. My brother and I had some uniqueness in our
careers that I think is worth putting in the record. Elizabeth,
my sister, is the second oldest child of the marriage of my
father and mother. She was born July 11, 1926, in Lafayette,
Indiana. So she and I are Hoosiers. She finished grade and high
school in Davis and spent a few years at Oregon State University
but did not finish there. She married a graduate from the
University of California at Davis, Donald Gale, and they have had
a career located in Davis and Woodland. Don is a building
contractor who worked with his father, also a contractor from
Winters, before he developed his own ousir.ess and became a
contractor in his own right. He and my sister have three beys.
They lived in Davis until Don got disillusioned with the Davis
city council's slow-growth, no-growth attitude. And because his
business was not thriving under that kind of an environment, he
moved to Woodland. That is where they are presently and have
been for a number of years.
Edgar, my brother, was born in Woodland on March 23, 1928.
His education through high school was in Davis and interestingly
enough — I don't know the reasons why — he had an education that
duplicated mine. He went to Berkeley as an undergraduate. I
don't recall what his major was but it was in the botanical
sciences, I'm sure, because he also went back to the University
of Wisconsin after graduating from Berkeley in 1950 for his Ph.D.
training in plant pathology.
His major professor was one of those big-four successors to
L. R. Jones, Professor Jim Dickson. So in his early career in
plant pathology he dealt with ce'real crops. When it came time
for him to get a professional position, he found one in Pullman.
With parents, James B. , Senior, and
Violet Kendrick in Ames, Iowa, 1925.
University of Wisconsin Professor J.C,
Walker, August 1961.
Above: Professors Max Gardner
(left) and J.B. Kendrick,
Senior, ca 1940.
Right: James B. Kendrick, Jr.,
1944.
29
Kendrick: Washington, at Washington State University, but it was with the
USDA in a laboratory established to study cereal diseases, and
more particularly it was cauled the "smut" lab. Smut is a
disease of cereals that is quite devastating, so this laboratory
was set up with three or four professionals to deal with smut
diseases of wheat.
Lage : So he was employed by the USDA rather than the university.
Kendrick: That is correct. And he spent his entire career with the USDA.
His career was very similar to mine with the University of
California because he ultimately was transfered to Beltsville,
Maryland, the early headquarters for many of the Agriculture
Research Service programs, as an administrator. From there he
progressed through various administrative assignments. At one
time, he was located in Tucson, where he presently has retired
and is now living. His administrative assignments took him to
Washington, D. C., Tucson, New Orleans, and again to Washington,
D. C. While in New Orleans he had the responsibility for all the
Agriculture Research Service workers in the southern region of
the U.S. With the establishment of the assistant secretaryship
for science and education in the USDA about six years ago, he was
able to serve as the acting deputy assistant secretary for
science and education with a very good friend of mine, Orville
Bentley. So his career in the USDA was not unlike mine with the
University of California, except that mine did not take me all
over the United States.
The uniqueness, and why I wanted to get it in the record, is
that in plant pathology — it is not a large profession — I don't
think there are many families with a father and two sons actively
engaged in plant pathology at the same time. Of course, my
father retired in 1960.
Lage: That is an amazing record.
Kendrick: So we were active, but not collaborators at the same time.
Lage: You don't have an explanation for your parallel paths?
Kendrick: I really do not. Except that I would guess that my father's
career was attractive enough to the two of us that we saw the
opportunities were there for anyone who wanted to work hard and
get a good education and could follow it. My father certainly
did nothing to discourage us from following him into that kind of
an activity.
Lage: But it wasn't an expectation.
Kendrick: No. He never laid down any kind of entreating requests that we
follow him [laughter] and perpetuate his interest in the field.
30
Lage: It's not like taking over the family business or anything.
Kendrick: No. It's not like expecting — as a physician — that you would come
back and take over the practice or, as you indicated, take over
the business and keep that running. I think it was more of a
feeling that it was a good life, as well as one that contributed
positive benefits to others and provided a good deal of happiness
in pursuing that kind of activity. There were too many years
between my brother and me to have anything in common while we
were growing youngsters. In subsequent years we have become
close and have followed each other's activities very closely.
He retired before I did. He had his thirty years of service
when he reached age fifty-five and was a little tired of the
administrative life that he was leading. Washington, B.C., gets
under many people's skin, and they get Potomac fever; Potomac
fever describes an attitude of people in the federal government
who become impressed with their own importance because of the
positions they occupy and the renown of their associates. But
there is no question about the exciting environment of
Washington, D.C. I think there are a lot of good people in
Washington, D.C. I am continually impressed with the quality of
people in government in certain areas, but you encounter the
other kind also, frequently enough to make it unattractive to
those of us who live in the "provinces."
Lage: Well, your brother retired to Tucson, so that must say something
about his experiences in Washington, B.C.
Kendrick: Perhaps.
Glenn Pound, Fellow Gradua te Student
Kendrick: Let us get back to my own education. Shortly after Evelyn and I
arrived in Madison in the fall of 1942 and had located the third
floor turret apartment that would be our home for about nine
months, we drove to the campus to try and make contact with
Professor Walker. We pulled into the parking lot next to Moore
Hall, which housed the agronomy and plant pathology departments,
and sat for a few minutes looking bewilderedly at one another
wondering, "What next?" We then saw a person walking toward us
with a jaunty step and whistling a merry tune. He stopped and
said, "May I help you?" "Well," we said, "You certainly can,"
because at that point I did not know where I was to go next as
far as locating people was concerned.. That person turned out to
be Glenn Pound, and that was the beginning of a long and fruitful
friendship with him and his wife, Daisy.
31
Kendrick
Lage:
Kendrick :
Lage:
Kendrick
Glenn was a graduate student in plant pathology and was about
finished with his program of training at that point. He got his
Ph.D. degree in mid 1943. Glenn's career led ultimately to the
chairmanship of the Department of Plant Pathology at Wisconsin
and dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at
Wisconsin, from which position he retired. He is now living in
La Jolla. He had an Arkansas twang and an unlimited supply of
jokes — good jokes that were not obscene — and always had a story
that was appropriate for the occasion. He has a great sense of
humor and is just fun to be with, but he also possesses a keen
mind and was a good leader. We continue to cherish the warm
friendship that started forty-six years ago in a parking lot in
Wisconsin with that, "May I help you?".
His career has certain parallels with yours also.
Well, to some extent. He's participated in national affairs like
I have and chaired some rather significant national committees.
One committee which he chaired brought him considerable
notoriety. It was a committee sponsored by the National Academy
of Science to study and evaluate the research program of the
Agriculture Research Service (ARS) of the USDA. The committee's
report was very critical of the quality and creativeness of ARS
research. It received a lot of attention in the scientific press
and Congress where it became known as the Pound Report. That is
the fate of any chair of a committee which issues a report which
has an impact. If it doesn't have an impact, you never hear
about it anymore; but this was one of the early evaluations of
agriculture research which pointed out that it could be very much
better than it had become. Needless to say, it was controversial,
and caused a certain amount of embarrassment for the USDA
administration and the research participants. It was an
evaluation by people external to the USDA, some of whom were not
agricultural scientists. They were, however, experienced in
basic biology and chemistry, and they pointed out rather
forcefully that the lack of peer review and competitiveness in
the system was detrimental to its quality.
So the academic model did not prevail.
No, not in the USDA, And ultimately, the USDA did develop a
competitive grant system and one of the agencies that my brother
headed for the assistant secretary just before his retirement was
the Office of Competitive Grants and Special Projects. I like to
think that I had a certain amount of influence in trying to get
the USDA to accept the competitiveness of grants, and certainly
my brother was an enthusiastic administrator of that program — so
we were not without our hand in the pie, in a way.
Lage:
When was that Pound Report?
that?
Did you give us a general date on
32
Kendrick: Well, it goes back to probably the early 1970s, in that period,
because I was vice president at that time, and it came along
fairly early in my administrative career. We will get into some
other things that followed it because I participated in a couple
of evaluations myself, but that really is part of the
administrative story downstream a little bit.
Lage: What else did you find at Wisconsin? I know you had some things
on your mind that you wanted to cover.
Kendrick: As I mentioned earlier, I was fortunate, I felt, in receiving a
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation fellowship amounting to six
hundred dollars a year.
Lage: That would not take you too far today.
Kendrick: That fifty dollars a month paid our rent. But in addition, the
fellowship paid my tuition and fees, so the actual cost of going
to school was taken care of by the fellowship. The Wisconsin
Alumni Research Foundation was developed from the proceeds of
patents on inventions developed from Wisconsin research. One of
the most lucrative early patents covered the irradiation of milk
which caused the enhancement of vitamin D. Then the subsequent
big money item was a patent on the development of warfarin
[Wisconsin Alumni Research foundation + coumarin] , which is an
anti-blood-clottir.g factor that came out of moldy hay. It was
isolated by the biochemistry group there. It had been developed
as a rat poison and is also used in medicine as an anti
coagulant.
We really survived by Evelyn working as a bank teller at a
downtown bank in Madison for seventy-five dollars a month. We
lived on that plus the savings we had made through my own
activities working summers and holidays and her accumulated
wealth as a bank teller in Davis, which was meager. [laughter]
We really did not feel that we were suffering much, but we did
not splurge either.
The Lasting Influence of J. C. Walker and other Wisconsin
Professors
Kendrick: I want to say a little bit about J. C. Walker, the man who was my
mentor. His influence has been everlasting. I think most major
professors of hard-working graduate students leave some kind of
impression, either good or bad; fortunately Dr. Walker's
impression, on me at least, was good. But he has had a
reputation of being cool, cdd, distant, hard-driving, not
terribly communicative — not a person that you could warm up to.
33
Kendrick: Just the opposite of my father. My father treated his graduate
students like members of the family. Dr. Walker had so many
students that he could not really treat them that way. But his
nature was not one of warmth, at least at that stage of his life.
His technique of training was to test you initially to see
if you had enough initiative and ingenuity to survive all the
hard work of graduate school. He was the kind of person who puts
you blindfolded into a room and says, "Find your way out." He
didn't tell you where the obstacles were or where the door was;
he just wanted to see how well you would solve the puzzle on your
own.
Lage: Is this on your research projects?
Kendrick: Yes, it was in the research area, primarily. The selection of
the courses that I needed to take was not solely my own decision;
the courses were pretty well prescribed by Dr. Walker. I did not
have many courses that I had to take, but there were some
graduate courses that were necessary. Fortunately, my botany,
genetics, and zoology had provided a pretty good base training.
I did not have any major gaps in my training except for
systematic botany, which I did not have before I went into the
graduate training. My minor was in plant physiology. Dr. Walker
had a very close colleague, Dr. Benjamin M. Bugger, an eminent
plant physiologist who after retiring went to the Lederle Drug
Company and had another career in developing antibiotics. I
think it was his laboratory at Lederle that discovered
aureomycin. It was a given that if you were Dr. Walker's student
during those years that you were going to minor in plant
physiology, and that Dr. Dugger was going to be your minor
professor.
Lage: So how did it feel to be thrown into this?
Kendrick: Well, it was a little strange, although I would say that I was
not exactly hand-fed going through Berkeley. Berkeley provides
another experience where no one takes you by the hand and leads
you through it. You get through Berkeley mostly by your own
ingenuity and persistence. So Wisconsin was not all that
different to me. My own self-starting attitude was enough for me
to decide that, if that was the way to survive, then I would do
what was needed to be done. But I must admit that I did not have
much training in how you pursue a research program.
I recall that Dr. Walker called me into his office after I
had been around about a month, and he had a little paper sack.
He opened it up and pulled out a couple of tomatoes. He said,
"Here, Jim, what do you observe about these tomatoes?" I said,
"Well, they appear to have a couple of rots." He said, "Yes,
they do. Why don't you go find out what is known about them."
34
Kendrick: And that was my introduction to an early research program. It
turned out that the rot was tomato ar.thracnose [spells]. I
hesitate to tell you what it was caused by — Colletotrichum
phomoides [spells].
Lage : [laughs] We'll have to run this as a test for our transcribers —
Kendrick: You can imagine the exercise I put my wife through. She typed
all of my reports, including my thesis. By the time we had
finished three years of association of this kind, she got to the
point where she was pretty good with the Latin. The best thing
about these long, complicated words is that they are spelled just
about like they sound. There are not a lot of silent letters so
that if you can sort your way through the phonetics, you can come
pretty close to the spelling.
Lage: When you took the tomatoes back to the lab, was there anyone
there to guide you along?
Kendrick: Well, in research, the first thing you have to find out is what
people already know about the topic you have decided to look at.
After you reassure yourself of what the disease is, then you do a
library search of the literature to determine what is known about
the disease and where the gaps of information are. Then you
begin to design experiments to get information to fill the gaps.
Doc Walker's technique of research training was to keep his
suggestions to a minimum and to let his students work through a
problem pretty much on their own. One of his colleagues would
have a weekly conference with each of his graduate students, so
they really didn't have much leeway to stray from the way that
particular colleague thought the problem should be handled. He
wanted to guide his students, almost step by step; that was not
Dr. Walker's technique. He knew that eventually you were going
to be thrown out into the big, wide world on your own and there
was not going to be a Doc Walker close at hand to guide you
through your research. So I think part of his training plan was
just to see if his students had the basic inquisitive ness to make
good research workers.
Lage: Was he very critical in his evaluation of you?
Kendrick: Well, you can imagine I did not start off like gangbusters as the
most original researcher that he had ever come in contact with.
I wanted some verification of what I thought he had given me — if
some of the gaps I had determined existed were correct, and if
looking into some of the aspects of the disease development were
the things that he thought were important — bearing in mind that
the ultimate goal of plant pathology is to control the disease
35
Kendrick: that you are dealing with. You really need to keep in mind that
the research in plant pathology, at least in those days, was
always conducted towards taking care of the problem of disease
development in the field. So our discussions really developed
around that point of view.
And then in order to earn my fellowship, he asked me to work
with his reprints' filing system. I do not recall specifically
what I was doing, but I was doing something with his literature
card-file system to bring it up to date. I think he had two
things in mind in assigning that task to me: one was to acquaint
me with the literature, and also to help him keep his filing
system current. On reflection many years later, I recognized his
wisdom as a teacher in not spoon-feeding his students.
He also had a reputation of being able to bawl out students
who seemed to fall a little short of his expectations. So they
would tread pretty lightly around him and avoid his presence if
they felt that he was not feeling up to snuff that day. He was a
very keen observer, which I didn't realize early on. I didn't
see him regularly, and in fact I got the feeling that he did not
know whether I was around or not.
But in later years I realized what a keen observer he was.
One episode in particular exemplifies the keenness of his
observation. Much of the research conducted by Wisconsin's plant
pathology graduate students was done in temperature-controlled
greenhouses. And even though there seemed to be plenty of
greenhouse space, it was always in great demand. The space
available never quite matched the need.
Well, the greenhouses were always full of students' research
programs. One of my colleagues was working on a virus problem —
the host plant doesn't matter and I have forgotten what it was,
but it was a vegetable of some kind. He got called into Dr.
Walker's office one Monday morning and was really read the riot
act. Something had occurred. He soon found that Dr. Walker had
gone through that greenhouse area on Saturday or Sunday morning —
he was over there every day of the week usually early in the
morning — and observed some aphids infesting these plants. Well,
that invalidated the test, of course, because aphids are a
transmitter of virus diseases, and he could not be sure of the
results of his transmission tests. Doc Walker was really teeing
off on the student for his sloppiness in his research technique.
This episode demonstrated to me that Doc Walker was not as
uninformed about our activities as it appeared. His observation
of what was going on in those greenhouses was very keen and very
comprehensive so there was no way of misleading him about the
progress you were making in your research program.
36
Kendrick: In 1946, when I went back to Wisconsin to finish my graduate
career — and I am going to fill in the time-gap later on — Dr.
Walker asked if I would move into the little laboratory adjacent
to his office. Most of the graduate students were in one of two
rooms. The advanced graduate students were in one large room and
the beginning graduate students were in another large room on
another floor upstairs close to the library. So those rooms were
always busy; somebody was there all the time, it seemed to me.
Dr. Walker always had one of his advanced students in the little
laboratory adjacent to his own office, and I happened to be the
one in 1946-1947. I occupied almost a gatekeeper role because
his reputation for moodiness continued even in those days. Often
when a student inquired, "Is Doc in?", I'd reply "Yes, he is in."
This would be followed by, "What kind of a mood is he in today?"
And I would say, "In a terrible mood." The student would almost
always respond, "Well, I won't go in to see him just new."
It was amusing to me to be placed in that role. I had never
experienced a harsh word from Dr. Walker. My colleague, Dr.
Grogan, who ultimately came to Davis in plant pathology had a
similar experience. There were a few students who never really
had angry words from Dr. Walker. Glenn Pound also was a student
of Dr. Walker, and I never heard him complain about his
relationship with Doc; the name we all used to greet him and by
which to refer to him. Doc was as good a student of individual
personalities as he was a teacher. I think he knew those who
responded to strong criticism and a dressing-down and those on
whom that kind of tactic would not work.
Lage : So it was all very controlled.
Kendrick: That's a good way to put it. It was a controlled anger at times.
I think we all have very fond memories of Doc. There are very
few people — even those who were dressed up and down one way or
another — who are not without great fondness for him. He still
lives. He is ninety-four and lives in Sun City, Arizona. I have
not seen him in many, many years. But we do hear from him at
Christmas when we exchange Christmas greetings.
There was one other episode which stands out and
characterizes Dr. Walker's relationship with his students that I
would like to record. In the spring of 1944, two of his grad
students were in a laboratory adjacent to the one where I was
ultimately housed during my last graduate year. These two
students had a reputation of putting off things which needed
doing. Something triggered Walker one day, and he went into the
laboratory and cornered the individual who was the source of his
ire. He was really reading the riot act to him, largely because
he seemed not to be paying attention to his academic progress.
He said, after a little drtissir.g-down, "Your qualifying
examination is scheduled a month from today. Be ready for it."
37
Kendrick: He turned or. his heels to the other colleague who was trying to
make himself as inconspicuous as possible because it was a little
embarrassing to be there through that tirade. And he said, "And
yours is scheduled the week following."
Lage: That was their first notice of the exams?
Kendrick: That was their first notice of their qualifying examinations, but
the real problem was that you could not take your qualifying
examination until you had satisfied your language requirements.
And neither one of those individuals had satisfied their language
requirement of French and German. So it meant that one of them
had a month and the other had five weeks to pass their French and
German examinations which were given by the respective language
departments, and then get prepared for this qualifying exam.
Well, they made it. [laughter] As you can imagine, that news
got around that graduate student group like the spread of the
plague.
Lage: There was no appeal?
Kendrick: No, there was no appeal. There was no room for negotiations. It
was just, "You've been here long enough, and you're going to get
on with it." It was another one of these Walkerisms that I
remember because it had its impact.
Lage: Did this approach influence you as a teacher?
Kendrick: No. Well, it did to the extent that I didn't feel that it was
necessary to outline in detail what I wanted my students to do.
I wanted to do the same thing that Doc Walker did. Test out the
ability of the students to dig through a problem for themselves.
So that part of the technique I used. I didn't rant and rave as
much as Doc did. [laughter]
Lage: That goes with the personality, I'm sure.
Kendrick: Some other impressions that I have — I didn't have many professors
at Wisconsin, but of course Walker and Dugger I have mentioned.
Dugger was a very kindly, soft-spoken individual in the botany
department, and one who appeared to be terribly unorganized. Ke
was not a good lecturer; I found it difficult to follow him. He
would come into the lecture room loaded down with books and
proceed to quote from various sections of those books, trying to
emphasize a point that he was making. I recall going to his
office to visit with him to get some references for a paper that
I had to write, and it looked like the receiving room of a
library. Things were stacked all over the place, and he would
reach into the middle of a stack and pull out something: "Here
is what I want you to look at." He seemed to know where
38
Kendrick: everything was, but it looked like organized chaos. He retired
when I was in the armed service, so my successor plant physiology
teacher was Professor Fritz Stauffer.
Another man who left a lasting impression on me because of
his work habits was Myron Backus, a professor of botany and later
a professor of plant pathology. Professor Myron Backus was a
mycologist, and we had to take a number of courses in
nomenclature of fungi and make collections of them. Backus also
was the co-teacher of the beginning course in plant pathology.
All graduate students had to take it. It was really meant to
show what was demanded of you if you were serious about going
into plant pathology: we had to write a minor thesis once a
week. During the semester we had fifteen diseases to review and
summarize everything known about them in a written report. This
required a lot of literature reviewing. Myron Backus left ir.e
with a practice that I followed through my own teaching career.
He not only graded on thoroughness and comprehensiveness of the
reports, but he also corrected the grammar and spelling in them.
Lage: That's probably unusual in the sciences.
Kendrick: It's unusual anywhere in my experience. [laughter] I decided
that I would require correct English expression from my students
even though I didn't do a lot of teaching. We didn't have much
opportunity at Riverside to teach until the graduate program came
into being. I realized that probably one of the most valuable
experiences I had learned from Professor Backus was how to write
in a scientifically understandable way. And so I required the
same thing in the reports which were prepared for me. I would
not accept student reports until they had improved their grammar
and their English. I don't recall if Backus ever did that, but
we got reports back that were well covered with red pencil
corrections in English and grammar.
Physiology of plant disease was taught by Professor Paul
Allen who was the same quality teacher as Backus, Bugger, and
Walker. My other teachers in plant pathology were Joyce Riker,
who taught the methods course, and Jim Dickson, who taught a
cereals' disease course, and George Keitt, who taught a fruit
disease course.
Trademarks of Wisconsin's Training in Plant Pathology
Kendrick: One important impression I gained from this early training period
with Dr. Walker was that one of the most important aspects of
plant pathology is the physiology of :he disease development. He
also was a strong proponent of controlling plant diseases through
39
Kendrick: disease resistance and plant breeding. He didn't hold fungi cidal
treatment in very high regard because I think he thought it was
of temporary value — kind of an expedient, rather than ultimately
getting at a more lasting control of these problems.
Lage: That seems like a rather contemporary view.
Kendrick: Well, his view of plant disease control was a forerunner of what
we call biological control today, which is responsive to the
antipesticide movement. An opposing view in the early forties
was expressed by a man who felt that the study and use of
fungicides was where he wanted to spend his career. He was the
widely renown plant pathologist in Connecticut, James Horsfall.
Because he built his reputation on the fungi cidal control of
diseases, there was always a little rivalry between these two,
each of whom felt that his approach probably was better than the
other one.
Lage: There wasn't the array of pesticides that came later, though.
Kendrick: No. Pesticides used for the control of diseases in plants
certainly fell far short in number of the array of chemicals that
were available to control insects. So plant pathology really did
not have at its disposal a lot of magic bullets. We really had
to look at a lot of other means of controlling diseases. That
was good basic training to have in terms of trying to deal with
diseases of plants.
Professor George Keitt was the epitome of a southern
gentleman who was a GLemson University graduate, as was my
father. He left a lasting impression on students who would
listen to him because he was an early exponent of the
epidemiology of disease inception and occurrence. He was working
with fruit tree diseases — cherries and apples. Apple scab was a
particularly tough disease to understand and control. The only
way to control it was with fungi cidal sprays. But Dr. Keitt was
interested in what influences in the environment triggered the
early infections and the subsequent development, or lack of
development, of the disease itself. So he and his students
conducted experiments to measure all the environmental elements
through the life cycle of the pathogens and their hosts. That
was a very fundamental contribution to the understanding of
disease development which demonstrated to me the importance of
the environment in plant pathology. This early research also
contained the same basic elements of investigation as are
contained in the pest management program presently under way in
the University of California.
Lage: Integrated pest management?
40
Kendrick: The integrated pest management program is based upon
understanding the interaction between a host and its pest and
then applying some intervening technique to disrupt the
progression of the interaction. Today we call this kind of study
"modeling the host" and "modeling the insect or the parasite."
The object is to compare them to see if you can find a weak link
in the life cycle of either the host or the parasite, at which
point one could intervene and disrupt the progression of the
disease or insect infestation.
Dr. Keitt's environmental studies were well underway when I
went back there in 1942. I think Professor L. R. Jones was
really the one who realized the importance of these
epidemiological studies, so their origin goes back into the early
twenties.
Lage : So that environmental approach was focused at Wisconsin?
Kendrick: It was fundamentally a Wisconsin contribution to the
understanding of plant pathology.
Lage: That's an interesting point.
Kendrick: As I've indicated, the two fundamental concepts of pest
management were contributed by Walker and Keitt: Walker being ar.
exponent of disease resistance and control through breeding, and
Keitt's careful measurement of the environmental factors in situ
in an attempt to relate them to subsequent disease development.
These were really trademarks of the Wisconsin training in plant
pathology as it affected me.
The first two years that I was there, I pursued anthracnose
of tomato, studying the fungus — the apparent cause of the
disease — and trying to find out how it existed in the field and
how it over-wintered.
Lage: So your interest in this assignment that he gave you in the
beginning continued.
Kendrick: It did.
A Brief Navy Career
Kendrick: Let me digress a little to show another activity of mine while at
Wisconsin. I am going to describe the chronology of my United
States armed service experience.
Lage: It came in the middle of graduate school?
41
Kendrick: Yes. In the fall of 1942, some of my graduate colleagues and I
were a little nervous about being in school while some of our
colleagues were in the armed service. Bear in mind that the U.S.
was engaged in World War II, and things were pretty furious in
the fall of 1942. So we decided to go to Milwaukee and enlist in
the navy. The navy had an attractive program called V-7.
Graduates of this program were sort of ninety-day wonders, who
emerged as ensigns in the officer corps of the United States
Navy.
Ray Grogan — whom I mentioned earlier and who has just
retired as a professor of plant pathology at the Davis campus
where he spent his career — and I together with several others
decided to enroll in the V-7 program. Ray was inducted into the
V-7 program after passing the physical examination, and I was
inducted into what was described as the V-7S program. They told
me that I was put inV-7S because my eyesight wouldn't allow them
to qualify me for the regular V-7 program. Well, I didn't have
very poor eyesight, but I was wearing glasses. I have
astigmatism, which doesn't permit me to read very well without
correction. So I said, "Well, that sounds ok to me. What is the
V-7S?" They said, "Oh, it's a special program for developing
meteorologists and weather forecasters." And that sounded fine.
But they also said, "You don't have enough college math to
qualify for that program." "Oh, I don't? What do you suggest?"
"Well, go back and enroll in a college math program and get some
more math."
Kendrick: We were inducted into the navy that afternoon as inactive
apprentice seamen. My friend Grogan, however, was activated at
the end of that fall term, and he went into regular service then.
Since I was asked to take an additional course in math, I
enrolled in a course in the spring of 1943 while I was in this
inactive status.
At the end of the spring semester I got a notice from the
naval district in Chicago that merely stated I had failed to
qualify for the V-7S program. I was a little flabbergasted and I
wondered if something had happened with my grade in the math
course that I was unaware of. I had not been a diligent attender
of the math course, but I took all the examinations, and based on
my performance in them, I did not expect to fail that course.
Well, I quickly checked on my grade and found that I had gotten a
B so I was reassured about that. It then took me about three
weeks to find out precisely why I had failed.
You will recall I mentioned in the previous session that
majoring in botany, zoology, and genetics was a bit difficult to
explain throughout my career. They navy replied that they didn't
42
Kendrick: have a place in the navy officer V-7S program for someone who had
majored in botany, zoology, and genetics. They gave me two
options: one was to activate me as an apprentice seaman and
assign me to wherever I seemed to be qualified, and the other was
to return me to selective service status, in which case they
would give me an honorable discharge. I wasn't attracted to
being an apprentice seaman, so I selected the option to have an
honorable discharge. I got one.
I then noted that after going back to selective service
status my draft number was slow to come up. So I continued in
school, working very hard to finish the required courses, to get
the language examinations taken care of, and to get the
qualifying oral examination out of the way. I did all of that in
the fall of '43 and the spring of '44. By early spring of '44, I
decided that I had had enough of being a civilian while all hell
was breaking loose around us. And so when I had finished my
qualifying examination, I was determined that I would ask for
induction.
Army Training and Assignments; A Waiting Game
Kendrick: Once again, Evelyn and I packed up our 1937 Dodge coupe, mustered
all the gas coupons we could find, and on tires that looked like
they couldn't make it across the country, came back to
California. I was inducted into the U.S. Army at the Presidio in
Monterey in June of 1944.
I was sent to Camp Barkley, Texas, which was located near
Abilene, for basic training in a medical unit — field medics. It
was one of the most miserable hot summers that I have ever
experienced. It was that experience where I probably lost any
enthusiasm for camping that might have been latent in my plans
for future recreational activities.
Lage: Made you wished you'd stayed in the navy, probably.
Kendrick: [laughs] No, I never reflected back on having made that choice.
I realize that basic training is basic training no matter where
you go, but when you're experiencing it, it's like a toothache.
You wish it would go away.
I might say that my army experience as an enlisted person
left another lasting impression that upon reflection I think was
good for me. Because associations were determined by the first
letter of your last name, the alphabet had more to do with
arranging your living groups than anything else. You live in a
communal relationship, so if somebody snored loudly or was
43
Kendrick: particularly obnoxious, you couldn't exclude him from your group
because his last name placed him with the "Ks". You had to
somehow get along, and try to subjugate your own peculiarities to
an extent that you were not obnoxious yourself. You had to
develop a tolerance for other people's individualities that I
think did me a lot of good.
Lage: You meet a lot of types you probably wouldn't have met.
Kendrick: You meet a lot of types, all right, that open up your eyes a good
deal.
Having been assigned to a medical unit I confess was
somewhat of a self-selection process because the basic education
of a lot of these inductees was pretty good. There were some
college graduates along with me, so the process of grouping was
not completely random among all inductees. Even so, there were
some very different individuals in my group.
Following basic training, we all were advanced to some
specialized training where selection was based on background and
aptitude. I was selected for special training as a medical
laboratory technician and sent to Fort Benjamin Harrison, near
Indianapolis, Indiana, for three months. That was late fall and
winter of 1944. Evelyn came back and spent a couple of months
living in a room in a house in a small community near the base.
So during what time I did get off from training, we had some time
together to become acquainted with Indianapolis. There are not a
lot of things I remember about Indianapolis, except the winter
was very cold, and we tired of eating in restaurants.
After finishing that program to become a laboratory
technician — which provided me with training in parasitology,
serology, blood chemistry, and urinalysis — I felt constructively
trained, and I enjoyed the expanded knowledge I had received.
But then began a long frustrating period waiting for an
assignment as a medical laboratory technician. I was really
disillusioned when I didn't go right out into a medical
laboratory, either in a field unit or in an established hospital.
Lage: They must have needed lab technicians.
Kendrick: Well, I thought so, but the way my training was wasted you would
have never guessed it.
After my Indianapolis training I was sent to Camp Crowder,
Missouri, where I waited about a month for an assignment and was
eventually assigned as a medical orderly in a hospital-train unit
operating out of Stater. Island, New York. For about four
months — which turned out to be pretty good duty — I rode hospital
trains across the country. This was the time when we were
Kendrick: engaged in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, which resulted ir. a
lot of casualties to our troops. Our unit was receiving these
returning casualties and distributing them to army hospitals
across the country. We would be on constant duty for quite a
while on those hospital trains, so when we returned to Stater.
Island, we would have several consecutive days off duty. That
gave us ample time to explore the Big Apple. New York City was a
marvelous city for service personnel in those days. You could
get free tickets to Broadway plays and almost any entertainment
event scheduled. So I saw a lot of New York City at that time.
But I still was not doing what I thought I was going to be
able to do, and that was working in the laboratory. I suddenly
was sent I think to some camp in Arkansas, I don't recall which
one that was now, where I waited yet another period for an
assignment. This time I was sent to an army hospital in Daytona
Beach, Florida. That was in the summer of 1945. They sent me
down there to a hospital, finally, as a laboratory techni car-
Hooray I I thought I was finally going to get to do something for
which I was trained.
So I showed up at the hospital, and the doctor in charge
took one look at me and said, "You're here to do what?", or words
to that effect. He was less than cordial in his welcome. I
didn't learn until later that the reason he was not cordial was
that they had been transferring existing personnel with some
disabilities from his hospital laboratory. They were sending
them overseas to field hospitals. Then I showed up able-bodied
and brand new, and he was furious that the army would take an
experienced technician who really wasn't in 1A physical condition
and send as a replacement someone who was physically able and
inexperienced and [laughs] who ought to have been relocated to
the war zone.
So I lasted one day. The officer in charge said he wouldn't
have anything to do with me. I spent another week or so waiting
for new orders. Those came in due course, and I was reassigned
to the army transportation unit at Fort Lawton, Seattle,
Washington.
Lage : Well, you got all about the country, then.
Kendrick: I boarded the train in Daytona Beach and headed for Seattle,
Washington. You can't design a train trip much longer than that
in the United States. I don't recall just how long it took to
get there, but it was a long trek.
In the late summer of 1945, I was working in the base
hospital in the serology laboratory at Fort Lawton, my first
laboratory assignment after being trained the previous year as a
45
Kendrick: laboratory technician. That's when I really learned how to draw
blood from people's arms. We were doing a lot of serological
surveys of service personnel, mostly for malaria.
That assignment was another holding operation for me until
medical units were formed and assigned to hospital units aboard
troop-ship carriers. I was assigned to a medical complement unit
aboard the army troop transport called the SS Marine Flasher.
(Flasher is the name of a fish.) These were C-4 transports that
had the capacity for about 3,500 troops. We had a small hospital
on board with 125— bed capacity. The unit's personnel consisted
of a physician who was the medical unit's commander and the
enlisted personnel who provided the support. There were about
twelve of us, and I was the laboratory technician, another person
was the pharmacist, several others were the surgical assistants,
and then there were some medical assistants and male nurses.
The ship was brand-new, still receiving some finishing
touches in San Francisco when I was sent from Seattle to San
Francisco in the late fall to join the ship's complement. The
interesting thing about that particular ship was the mixture of
units which composed its crew. The army was in charge of the
ship in terms of its command. The merchant marines were in
charge of operating the ship, so the captain of the ship was a
civilian in the merchant marines, as were his crew. We also had
a small navy complement on it to handle the few guns and what
little other armament that we had for our protection. So we had
a mixture of army, navy, and merchant marine personnel aboard
this ship.
This assignment came after Hiroshima. The Marine Flasher
was one of many ships which at that time were being assembled for
the invasion of Japan. So when the war came to an end in August
after we dropped the atomic bomb, there were a lot of
reassignments and redirections. As I recall, we sailed on
Christmas Eve with replacement troops and civilian personnel on
board. Our destination was Jinsan (now called Inchon), Korea, by
way of Two Jim a, Okinawa, and Shanghai.
We had a very rough crossing. We just missed the tail end
of a devastating typhoon but experienced a lot of rough sea near
Okinawa. There wasn't much left of Okinawa when we pulled into
one of the bays there. As the sole laboratory technician, I had
a lot of experience helping with the diagnosis of venereal
diseases, and on the return trip with the war veterans there were
interesting diseases involving parasites causing intestinal
problems and a lot of malaria. I really enjoyed the microscopic
search and identification of parasites in the blood and in the
intestinal tract.
46
Kendrick: We had a good stop in Shanghai for three or four days. I dor.'t
know just why we were there, but we were. In Korea we loaded up
the vets who had been through Okinawa and returned them to Long
Beach, California. It was many years later that I discovered a
close colleague of mine, Ivan Thomason, was among those 3,500
troops on board the Marine Flasher on that trip to Long Beach.
Ivan grew up in Davis and is about the age of my brother. Ke is
now a professor of hematology on the Riverside campus, is also a
Wisconsin plant pathology graduate, and another Calif orr.iar. who
was sent back to Mecca for training — he did his undergraduate
work on the Davis campus.
Lage : Interesting that you even discovered it.
Kendrick: I don't know how we did, but we've been close friends for a long,
long time, and I think we were probably reminiscing about our
respective experiences in the war. He reminded me that the
troops referred, not so affectionately, to the Marine Flasher as
the "Latrine Splasher." [laughter] I think it was probably more
accurately described by them than by us. We had good duty on board
ship. Our quarters were on the top deck, in the high-rent district
of present-day cruise ships. I was nevertheless anxious to termin
ate my service career as soon as possible because the war was
over. I was anxious to get on with my graduate school program.
We docked in Long Beach in about February of 1946. The war
was over, and as I indicated, even though I enjoyed the ship
duty, I was not anxious to continue it much longer. I stayed out
of the officer training program because I decided that my non-
officer status would shorten my obligation to stay in the
service. I decided to petition for a discharge to return to
school, and it was eventually granted. I was sent to the Oakland
Army Base and then to Camp Beale near Marysville where I was
discharged. So after those two years, because of all the changed
assignments and waiting which prevented me from being in one spot
long enough to accumulate any kind of a record, I was separated
at the rank of private first class. I made one advancement in
the spring of 1946.
Well, my time in the armed service is a period that I
cherish because it was a broadening experience. I think it
influenced my subsequent dealing with people which would have
been different if I hadn't had that kind of experience. And one
of the unique things about my experience in the service is that I
possess an honorable discharge from both the army and the navy in
World War II, with eight months of inactive service in the navy
and about twenty-three months of active service in the army.
During the period I was in the service, with the exception of the
three months I was in Indiana, Evelyn lived with her parents on
the farm between Winters and Davis and worked in the Bank of
America in Davis.
47
Completing the Ph.D. ; Research on Bacterial Canker of Tomato
Kendrick: Evelyn and I bundled up our meager belongings and again trekked
back across the country in our 1937 Dodge coupe, which by that
time was getting close to being worn out, but it was all we had.
We returned to the same apartment at 204 North Mills Street,
which had become a plant pathology apartment by that time,
because when it became vacant the landlady would rent it to
another graduate student from plant pathology. My brother and
his first wife lived in the same apartment we occupied when they
went back to school in subsequent years. So in May of 1946 I
went back to Wisconsin for my final year of graduate work.
Because there had been so much time elapsed between the
anthracnose work and getting back into the swing of things in
1946, I was assigned a new research project. This time Doc
Walker didn't start me out like he did with the tomato
anthracnose problem. He said, "I'd like to have you take over
the drip system." The drip system consisted of a greenhouse full
of tubing and crocks where various mixtures and concentrations of
nutrients were dripped constantly into pots of sand in which we
grew plants. It was like hydroponics with sand added for support
of the plants.
He said, "I think we ought to follow the study that Foster,"
another of his graduate students, "has done on fusarium wilt of
tomato with a bacterial problem of tomato. So why don't you do a
study on bacterial canker of tomato?" "Fine with me, Doc," I
said.
Lage : Was that the usual thing, that the professor would more or less
assign a research topic?
Kendrick: It was the usual thing with Walker. I don't know that that was
necessarily true for all of his students, but he usually laid out
the general outline of the research problem. That was the way he
operated and was reason enough for him to share the authorship
with his students of the journal papers which arose from the
research.
So my thesis problem involved a study of nutritional and
environmental influences on the development of bacterial canker
of tomato. The causal organism of this disease is a mouthful,
which I've written here, Corynebacterium michiganense. It was a
disease with which I was familiar because my father had worked
with it in California, and it was a particularly destructive
disease for tomatoes. It's highly contagious and easy to pass on
to other plants by handling them. At that time field-grown
tomatoes were seeded first in nursery beds. When the seedling
plants were several months old, they were pulled and then
48
Kendrick: transplanted into the field. They don't do that any more; they
seed them directly into the field and this is the best way to
control this particular disease. But when tomato seedlings were
grown in those nurseries, and an infection occurred in a dense
population of plants, it was easy to infect a lot of plants, and
it's fatal. You don't get any tomatoes from a plant that's
infected by Corynebacterium.
The results of my nutritional study were published in the
American Journal £f Botany in 1948, Volume 35, under the title
"Plant Nutrition in Relation to Disease Development, IV:
Bacterial Canker of Tomato." Walker and his students developed a
series of nutritional studies of various diseases. I had also
taken advantage of the environmentally controlled facilities that
existed at Wisconsin in the plant pathology greenhouse to study
the effect of soil and air temperatures on predisposing the
tomato to subsequent development of bacterial canker. So I got
another research paper out of the thesis that was entitled
"Predisposition of Tomato to Bacterial Canker." That one was
published in the Journal of Agricultural Research, Volume 77,
1948.
To show that none of the time I spent studying tomato
anthracnose was wasted, I also published a paper on anthracnose
of tomato. So out of the three years I spent in Wisconsin, three
early papers resulted from my professional activity and from
Walker's overall guidance and advice.
Lage: How was it decided to publish one in the Journal ^f Agricultural
Research and one in the American Journal ^f Botany? Were they of
a different nature?
Kendrick: Well, the Journal jaf Agricultural Research ceased publication in
1949. The reason that the American Journal _of Botany was
selected for the nutrition study was because that's where the
series had started. The Journal _of Agricultural Research was
also a highly respected journal.
Lage: Did they have different orientations?
Kendrick: The paper and the series I think probably would have been more
appropriately published in the Journal of Agricultural Research
or in Phytopathology, which is the journal of the plant pathology
profession. But authors who published the first paper of this
series chose the American Journal of Botany for whatever reason,
and maybe Walker just wanted to spread his papers around a little
bit. It was a respected journal and had a good review policy, so
that's where it went.
49
Kendrick : The Journal of Agricultural Research was published by the United
States Department of Agriculture, and as its name implied, it was
intended that a wide variety of research related to agriculture
be published in that journal. It had a good and rigorous review
policy. The plant pathologists discovered that it was a
prestigious place to publish their own research, and in the
latter part of its existence, it became more of a plant pathology
journal than a general agricultural research journal. I think
the USDA, seeking some economy, decided that they really couldn't
support a journal publication which was used almost exclusively
by one segment of the agricultural scientists. So it was
terminated about two volumes after the one which I published in.
We were sorry to see it go because it was a good publication and
had good circulation. So it was a real loss as far as plant
pathologists were concerned.
Well, the best thing about finishing my work at Wisconsin is
that Walker wouldn't let you get away with just an unpublishable
thesis. You had to almost immediately prepare your thesis for
journal publication. As you can see, within a period of a year
following the granting of my doctor's degree, we had some
publications to show for my research efforts.
When I returned to Wisconsin in 1946, I was given another
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation assistant ship. In addition
I had my GI benefits, so we felt that we were living on easy
street. I recall I was paid about $250 a month. Since the WARF
assistantship took care of the tuition, and the GI Bill took care
of the books and all the other fees associated with school, we
determined that Evelyn didn't need to work, and she didn't. She
spent her time typing my reports and my thesis. She earned every
bit of the remuneration that was coming our way. Our recreation
was modest; it consisted mostly of bridge games with our
colleagues, an occasional show, but most of the time was pretty
much involved in the research program. I had to do a thorough
job of the research, accumulate and analyze the data, and then
write about it, and all that was done within a year. We figured
that if you spent much more time than three years in the program
to get a Ph.D., something was wrong. That certainly is not the
case nowadays.
Lage:
Kendrick: Oh, five or six years.
In your field, plant pathology, how long would you say people
spend now?
Lage: But three was the average then?
Kendrick: It was not just in plant pathology. Three was about average.
They wanted you in and out of the place as soon as possible,
[laughter] They didn't want you to hang around. One of the
50
Kendrick: reasons that these two colleagues whom I spoke about earlier
incurred Dr. Walker's displeasure was that they were taking
longer than he felt was necessary. They did not go into the
service; they were doing some assistar.tship work, not necessarily
associated with their thesis work. But they were very leisurely
about getting things done, and they were stretching it out too
long in his judgment, and he wanted to put the fire under their
feet to get them moving.
Appointment at the Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside
Kendrick: Well, I took my oral examination, the final examination, in May
of 1947. I had negotiated for a position at the University of
California's Citrus Experiment Station during that spring of
1947. This opportunity came to my attention through an inquiry
to Dr. Walker, who seemed to be on the inside circuit for any
position which was available anywhere for plant pathologists.
His students, if not in demand, at least had a good running start
on positions just because they were Dr. Walker's students. His
reputation for training was not confined to just Wisconsin.
So it was to our benefit to be one of Walker's students. Ke
brought to my attention that the Department of Plant Pathology at
Riverside was looking for someone to work in the area of
vegetable pathology at the Citrus Experiment Station, in
collaboration with John Middleton. John was the only plant
pathologist in southern California working with vegetables, and
it was a little overwhelming for one person to cover.
Dr. L. J. Klotz had just assumed the headship of that
department, following the retirement of Howard [S.] Fawcett, who
was the longtime previous head of plant pathology at Riverside.
Fawcett was a very famous citrus pathologist who came from
Florida and had made a tremendous reputation for himself. I
never really got to know Dr. Fawcett; I was acquainted with him,
but he had retired by the time I showed up. So my negotiation
was with Dr. Klotz.
He was negotiating at the time with two of us. One was Dr.
Baines, who was at Purdue University at the time, whom he was
anxious to have join the department to pursue nematology problems
in citrus, and I was the other.
Drs. Klotz and Middleton finally agreed that I was the
person they wanted, and I wasted no time in agreeing to return to
California, which was really a lucky circumstance. I did not have
my heart set on returning to California when I went into graduate
training. I was prepared to go wherever the opportunity seemed
51
Kendrick: to present itself. I participated in the formal graduation
ceremonies at the University of Wisconsin and received my Ph.D.
degree on May 24, 1947. It is interesting to note the relative
size between the undergraduate bachelor of arts degree from the
University of California and the Ph,D. underneath it [points to
framed degrees on wall — laughter] —
Lage: The University of California degree must be three times the size.
Kendrick: I think the importance of the two bear little relationship to
their size. But anyway, it was a happy day in Evelyn's and my
life. My father and mother came from Davis to attend the
graduation. I felt I was on top of the world because the dean of
the graduate school at Wisconsin was presenting the candidates
for graduate degrees to the president of the university. He
saved the Ph.D.'s until the last group on the program. There
were some M.D.'s awarded at the ceremony and they honored the
medical graduates adequately. But when the dear, came to the
Ph.D.'s, he had nothing but praise for the people who were being
awarded the highest academic degree universities could give. He
really laid it on about the tremendous accomplishments and
promise of these graduates and how much the people of the world
would benefit from the work of these scholars in the future. You
sort of felt like you walked across the platform with a cloud
under your feet. I think he laid it on a little strong, but he
was making sure that the M.D.'s realized that they were just
practitioners, and the PKD.'s were the creative scholars.
Anyway, we quickly packed up and headed back to California
in our 1937 Dodge coupe once again and arrived in Riverside the
second week of June in 1947. My appointment had begun on June 1
as a junior plant pathologist in the Agricultural Experiment
Station.
Lage: So this was a pure research position?
Kendrick: Yes, and the salary was the magnificent sum of $3,700 a year.
Lage: Well, it was magnificent compared to what you had.
Kendrick: It was sure a lot more than I was getting as a graduate student.
Lage: Was that competitive with salaries at other institutions?
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: Were there very many openings at the time?
Kendrick: As I recall, there were not a lot of openings, but I didn't make
this choice completely on my own. I was encouraged by Dr.
Walker, who knew a little bit about what was at Riverside, to
52
Kendrick: accept that position. I had a little advantage for the position
at Riverside because of my father and his colleague, Dr. Gardner,
who knew people at Riverside. Also, some of their colleagues had
been a part of Riverside's early staff and had returned to
Berkeley. Dr. Barrett, who was back in the Plant Pathology
Department at Berkeley, was one of the early staff members at
Riverside.
Riverside had a reputation at that point as a place without
a lot of rigor. I think the reason that it got that reputation
was because it was solely research-oriented. It did not have any
formal student instruction at that point. I think the reputation
wasn't deserved because they had many highly qualified and
productive staff members, but I can recall hearing the comment,
•XDh, you're going to go to Riverside to retire?" about a senior
colleague who was moving to Riverside.
Lage: That's a bit hard to take.
Kendrick: Certainly at twenty-seven, I wasn't ready to think about
retiring. And it had an exciting new program. Middleton was a
vigorous young man, and the Citrus Experiment Station was
beginning to add staff to its program to broaden its attention to
things. Some of it you will see in reading Al Boyce's
autobiography.* I ought to say that he certainly didn't regard
Riverside as a place to retire because he had a lot of rigor and
activity. I think it was a case of being a place where the sole
attention was research; it didn't have the distractions of
academic life at a regular campus with its committees, the
academic senate, and students' schedules to interfere with doing
research in the field. Some of that criticism, I think, was
envy.
* Alfred M. Boyce, Odyssey ol an Entomologist. UC Riverside
Foundation, 1987. Boyce had a leading role in the Citrus
Experiment Station from 1952 to 1968.
53
III CITRUS EXPERIMENT STATION, RIVERSIDE
Work of an Agricultural Researcher
[Date of Interview: 9/15/87] ##
Lage: Today we're going to focus on Riverside, your Riverside
experience.
Kendrick: Last time I described finishing our stay at Madison, the
graduation ceremonies, bundling up what meager possessions we
had, and once again getting that much worn-out 1937 Dodge coupe
back across the country.
We didn't quite make it to Riverside on the date of my
official appointment, which was June 1, 19A7, but we did arrive
in town on the 6th of June. I had obtained permission from Dr.
KLotz to delay my arrival by stopping briefly in Davis and
consulting about some of the disease problems associated with
California's agriculture.
The impression we had coming over Caj on Pass was really a
thrilling one. We arrived in the early evening when it was still
daylight. In 1947, of course, smog had not taken over the
environment, and you could see forever. Riverside was located in
an inland valley, and as we drove in we could see the many palm
trees and the citrus groves and smelled the fragrance of the
orange blossoms. It just looked like an ideal place to begin our
life and to settle down and realize that this was a bit close to
pa radi se .
We enjoyed Riverside. In those days, it was a city of about
45,000 people: large enough to provide you with some degree of
anonymity if you wanted it, but small enough to acquire friends
and recognition if that was what you wanted. We felt
particularly fortunate in being able to settle in Riverside
because it seemed to be only one hour away from everything that
was fun to do. It was an hour from Los Angeles; it was about an
54
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick!
Lage:
Kendrick:
hour from the beaches of the Pacific Ocean; it was an hour away
from Lake Arrowhead and the mountains; it was an hour away from
the desert and Palm Springs. It seemed to be just about an
hour's drive from a whole array of attractive extracurricular
kinds of activities, which we participated in in due course.
Dr. L. J. KLotz was the chairman of the Department of Plant
Pathology at that time. He was the person with whom I negotiated
the employment in the first place. He was a newly appointed
department chairman succeeding Dr. Howard Fawcett who had been
the previous chairman for many years. (I think at that stage of
the development of leadership in departments they were called
department heads which was later changed to chairmanships.)
My association was to be with Dr. John T. Middleton, who was
working with the diseases of vegetables in southern California.
The position I occupied was a new position, created for the
specific purpose of working with John and expanding the efforts
of the department into a study of diseases of vegetables in that
part of the state.
Was this a new direction for the station?
name "Citrus Experiment Station." How —
I'm thinking of the
Yes. We spent a good deal of time trying to explain to the
community that the Citrus Experiment Station contained people
working on crops in addition to citrus and subtropical plants.
The use of the name. Citrus Experiment Station, was legitimate
because the station was established originally to work on citrus
problems primarily. The Department of Plant Pathology at
Riverside took on crops other than citrus and dates with the
appointment of George Zentmyer and John Middleton. Both of those
men were appointed, I believe, about 1944. John may have been
appointed a little earlier, but not much. John's addition to the
staff was solely for the purpose of addressing the problems of
vegetables. Dr. Zentmyer was given the responsibility of
pursuing avocado diseases, primarily.
So it was a fairly new expansion.
That's true. I would say in the early forties. Date problems
had always been handled by Dr. Donald Bliss, another member of
the department, in addition to his citrus studies. The date
plantings were in the Palm Springs and Indio areas. So prior to
the early 1940s nearly everybody else in the department was
working on citrus problems.
Southern California, or our area of jurisdiction, covered
San Luis Obispo County and all counties south of that. So we had
a lot of geography to handle and felt relatively uninhibited in
pursuing the probltms.
55
Kendrick: I was appointed as a junior plant pathologist at the annual
salary of $3,700. At a reception for my retirement, the present
dean, Dean Sherman, had gone back into the files and had
retrieved a copy of my appointment document. He had it framed
and gave it to me. I said, "I thought there was a directive
covering the purging of files to eliminate documents which were
beyond their useful lifetime." [laughs] It was not until I got
this particular copy of my appointment that I discovered that the
position had been authorized at $3,900 a year. So somebody had
decided to save some money.
Lage: And see if they could get you for less.
Kendrick: And got me for $3,700 a year.
Lage: I think it's amazing that you remember.
Kendrick: Well, what I do remember was that during the first year and a
half, there were some unexpected salary adjustments. That was a
period when the University was providing regular salary
adjustments because their salaries had fallen behind those in
other comparable educational positions. I felt that I had really
stumbled into a great opportunity for salary growth.
The fact that the position was newly created and I was not
occupying a vacated position meant that I had an opportunity to
kind of establish my own program of work. The justification for
the position provided, however, some restriction in the areas in
which I began my research career. Dr. Middleton and I did quite
a bit of traveling to begin with, so that I could become
acquainted with the vegetables in southern California, which were
quite extensive and varied. And also to gain some appreciation
for the diseases that were affecting them.
I recall a meeting with the then director of the Citrus
Experiment Station which was little more than a courtesy visit.
Dr. Leon Batchelor was the director at that time. A very stern
and proper New England gentleman, he seemed not to smile very
much. I noticed Al Boyce described him in his book as on the
face of things pretty stern and strict, but if you got to know
him, quite warm and concerned. He, nevertheless, fit my mental
image of a director. He welcomed me to the staff at the Citrus
Experiment Station. He did use the occasion to point out that
the staff was there to solve problems for the grower and wished
me well. But I didn't see a lot of him after that.
Dr. Klotz was a warm and very informal person. Very
supportive, but not one that really had a lot of advice to give
on how to get my program underway. My guide through all this was
really John Middleton.
56
Lage: They said you're there to solve problems for the grower, but did
they give any further direction on how to relate to the grower?
Kendrick: No, it was pointed out that the Citrus Experiment Station could
be asked about field problems, and we were there to solve those
problems.
Lage: To find out what they were?
Kendrick: Yes. So the early experiments with John and our travels
throughout most of that region in southern California was a
gigantic learning experience for me. Although at Wisconsin I had
done a little traveling, it was in this first assignment that I
got some appreciation of the real world in terms of plant
pathology and the problems associated with growing plants in
large commercial areas. The agriculture of Wisconsin and
California aren't even close to being similar: the diseases were
different; the magnitude and size of the operations were
different. So it was really like starting all over again.
One of the things I noticed most was the gap between
instruction, where we were mostly looking at pure cultures and
single diseases, to a natural situation, where we were dealing
with complexes and multiple infections by various pathogens. It
is really very different. I didn't have much experience and
formal training in how you begin to sort out those complexes and
isolate the causes. So that knowledge came from learning by the
"seat of the pants" mostly.
John and I had formed a pretty good team, and we were very
compatible. Some things we did together, and other things we did
separately. He suggested that I take on the responsibility of
looking after the lima bean industry of southern California,
which was fairly extensive at that time, concentrated some in San
Luis Obispo County but mostly in Ventura, Orange, Los Angeles,
and San Diego Counties. Also, to look at pepper diseases, both
of sweet pepper and of chili pepper.
I found that the peppers were infected mostly with virus
diseases of various kinds that needed to be identified and
catalogued. The lima bean problems were mostly root rets
complicated with some infestations by a worm called the wire
worm.
Lage: Would there have been a growers association that came to the
Experiment Station and asked for help on these problems?
Kendrick: There was a lima bean growers association, yes, but they really
had not come to the Experiment Station as an association. The
organization in the southern part of the state that looked after
all vegetables was called the Western Growers and Shippers
57
Kendrick: Association. It is now known as the Western Growers Association,
and is an organization of vegetable growers in Arizona and
California, a fairly significant and powerful growers-supported
organization. That was the association where we made contact if
we needed to.
I would say that the most significant grower contact was
through the [Agricultural] Extension Service at that time. It
was really in response to some of the extension staff in Ventura
County that I started my field associations with extension and
with the field problems. It was through extension that I was
introduced to and became acquainted with a number of growers with
whom I worked and had field experiments on their properties.
So rather than working with the commodity associations per
se, even though I w as acquainted with them, extension personnel
played a more prominent role in my field work. In this regard it
was the extension personnel who stayed in touch with commodity
and grower associations, so it was only natural to cooperate with
the extension people in dealing with field problems.
Lage: It seems like the crops and the problems must have been multiple,
and how you choose —
Kendrick: Well they were. I've mentioned that I started with those two
crops, but I quickly found myself working with tomato blight,
celery pink rot, cantaloupe crown blight, and smog damage to
leafy vegetables. I worked also with carrot blight. There
seemed to be no limitation to the work. At one point I was
dealing with a problem of cucumbers that were being grown for
pickles in the El Monte region.
Most of the rural area where I spent much of my time in
those early days is now, of course, composed of incorporated
cities of Los Angeles County. But in the days when we started
our work, Los Angeles County was the leading agricultural county
in the nation, as far as the value of the commodities that were
being produced there was concerned. The major reason for that
ranking was due to the concentration of dairies in Los Angeles
County to supply the milk needed for that large population.
Those dairies subsequently were forced to move, and moved in two
directions. They moved to western San Bernardino County and
concentrated in the Chino area. The rest of them sold out and
moved into the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley.
Lage: So you were there during the period of the transformation of Los
Angeles County?
Kendrick: Yes. Long Beach and Lakewood — Long Beach of course was a city at
the time, but Lakewood was to some extent a bean patch. Orange
County was still Orange County when we were there, and the El
58
Kendrick: Monte- Covina-Puente area produced vegetables, citrus, and some
ornamentals. Carrots were concentrated in Chino and El Monte,
but the El Monte-Covina area was an important cauliflower and
cucumber area, grown for gherkins, little pickles. Cabbage,
celery was produced in Venice. So it was really quite
agricultural. The San Fernando Valley was full of walnuts and
citrus, mainly tree crops.
The rapidity with which all those regions were developed
into urban settlements accounts for the rapid development of
smog, as well as leaving nostalgic memories of what it used to
be.
Lage: It's a beautiful setting. You have to remind yourself now when
you go down there and can hardly see through the smog.
Kendrick: There was never really any doubt in my mind as what my Experiment
Station responsibility was. The job, as I indicated, was
justified on the basis that Middleton needed assistance in
addressing the multitude of problems associated with the great
variety of vegetables in that part of the country. They were a
valuable part of the total agriculture.
Agricultural Constituency in Southern California
Kendrick: The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was a very influential
organization in the agricultural circle. It had a subcommittee,
an agricultural committee, which was the organization that had
more than j ust a casual interest and influence in the development
of the program in southern California to address agricultural
problems of citrus, avocadoes, and vegetables.
This agricultural committee's chair was Doc Clements, who
when I first became acquainted with him was about eighty-five
years old. He was really recognized as the patriarch of the
organized influence on the University of California to focus
attention on agricultural problems in that part of the state.
He also was the organizer of what was called the San Andreas
Group. Les Remmers, one of my farmer-cooperators with whom I
worked in the San Juan Capistrano area, introduced me to this
group and invited me to several of their social events. San
Andreas Canyon, close to Palm Springs, was an area where they
used to retreat to, and a number of them had built desert homes
there. They would meet there on a semiannual basis for bull
sessions, discussions, poker playing and camaraderie.
59
Kendrick: You felt privileged if you were a part of that San Andreas Group,
because they were the movers and shakers of the agricultural
scene in southern California. They had no reluctance to invite
President Robert Gordon Sproul or Dean Claude Hutchison to meet
with them in order to arm-twist them into allocating resources to
augment the efforts in agriculture in southern California. The
leaders involved with major citrus holdings, such as the Limonera
Ranch, the Sespe Ranch, and Sunkist and Blue Anchor were all part
of that power structure.
Lage: Was that part of the power structure that got the station
established in the first place, which I guess goes way back?
Kendrick: Well, I think their forerunners were certainly instrumental in
doing so, although I don't know. The history that I read is not
that clear on that subject. But there were individuals who
ultimately were a part of that structure that were instrumental
in capturing the attention of the University's Agriculture
Experiment Station and they devoted their effort to getting a
station established. The station really owes its origin to a
pathological problem in walnuts, which is why I think the first
person sent down to southern California to establish the Whittier
lab was Ralph E. Smith, who was the chairman of the Department of
Plant Pathology here at Berkeley.
He was the first director of the Citrus Experiment Station,
but it was really not the Citrus Experiment Station at that time.
It was the Whittier Laboratory, which was a pathological
laboratory established to address the problems of walnuts. When
it looked like there was going to be a bigger commitment than
just to walnuts, several communities vied for the location of an
experiment station. They were Pomona, the San Fernando Valley
interests, and the Riverside interests. There is a history of
Board of Regents' action, resulting somewhat surprisingly in
selecting Riverside, but they were heavily lobbied to do that.
There might be confusion about the name "Citrus Experiment
Station" when the initial problem bringing Ralph Smith to
southern California was a walnut disease problem. However, there
was so much more citrus acreage than walnut acreage in southern
California, and so many problems with citrus, that the southern
California agricultural interests were determined to have an
experiment station devoted to citrus problems too. I think it
was foreordained that the University's agricultural research
effort in southern California be named the Citrus Experiment
Station, because of the prominence of citrus in the region at
that time.
I don't have my hands on it — I think it's in the hands of
Loy Sammet — but there's a history that Ralph E. Smith wrote about
his own involvement in plant pathology development in the
60
Kendrick: University of California, which includes a lot of the early
activity in the southland. It is valuable in terms of filling in
the record and the early activities as far as the Citrus
Experiment Station is concerned. I know that there's a copy of
it in the plant pathology department at Berkeley. So the
record's not lost.
Lage: I think that it's important just to refer to its existence here.
Kendrick: The successor to Doc Clements, who was a physician and had a
special interest in plants and their problems, was Calvin Bream,
an employee at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He took over
the responsibility for this subcommittee in agriculture. I
believe that the agricultural subcommittee of the Los Angeles
Chamber of Commerce still exists today. While they don't have an
activity and interest in farms that they had in the thirties and
forties and fifties, they have maintained themselves as an
interested unit. But during those years of Clements and Calvin
Bream, it was a source of support and contact with the community.
You always made certain that they knew what you were doing and
what your needs were. As I said, my assignment with the
Agricultural Experiment Station was never in doubt: the position
was justified and created on the basis that whoever occupied it
would address the problems of vegetables in southern California.
Investigating Vegetable Diseases
Kendrick: The experiment station operates on a project system. Everyone
who is a member of the regular staff works on approved projects.
To have a project approved, you conceived of how and what you
wanted to work on, and gave it to the department chairman for
review and approval. The chairman would sign off and send it to
the associate director of the experiment station, who would sign
off and then send it on to the director, and then the director
would sign off. It was really the first introduction to the
bureaucracy that I was ultimately to become a part of. And then
we were expected to file annual reports on those projects, on
what was accomplished, what had been published, what we proposed
to do in the future, how we were proposing to go about it, and a
modest literature review.
The project that I was associated with most of the time that
I was at Riverside was really conceived, I thought, with a great
deal of wisdom. It was not very satisfying to the administration,
but it was extremely satisfying to John and me. It was Project
1085, and the title was "An Investigation of Vegetable Diseases
in Southern California," which meant that we did net have to
revise that project. It had no termination date. We kept it
61
Kendrick: current by identifying subunits under the project, as we would
change our work schedule to address different problems with
different diseases and different host plants. It was a
constantly changing saga, but as far as the title was concerned,
it never changed.
In later years, that became somewhat of an embarrassment —
this was much much later, when I was administratively responsible
for this business. State auditors would look at the titles of
these old projects and find that they had been in force since the
early days — early twenties, thirties, and forties — and say, "This
is evidence that you never change. You're still working on the
same problems as you were twenty or thirty years ago. We have to
do something about this; we can't put up with such an obsolete,
in-the-rut kind of activity." Well of course, if you just look
at titles, that was the case.
So I spent a good deal of my time in later years explaining
to interested parties who were not inclined to want to support
the agricultural research program in the first place that we
really had a dynamic system that wasn't stuck in a rut. It was
changing with the times. But the evidence — summarized evidence
and aggregate evidence — was not very supportive of that point of
view, so it was difficult to get that point across. (That's
looking forward a little bit, because that leads into some of my
administrative frustrations that I encountered in later years.
So I inadvertantly contributed to some of my administrative
problems in later years. Faculty were/are generally
unsympathetic to revising projects on a timely basis, because it
seems to them to be an unproductive activity. I agreed because
it is primarily an administrative need and exercise.)
The evolution of my activities as a plant pathologist was
somewhat gradual. While I spent most of the early years setting
out field plots and trying to address the solution of these
problems in the field, it gradually became apparent to me that I
was not making very much progress in field experimentation and
that we needed to back up and look at a less complex situation.
So that is when I began to become more concerned about the
dynamics of an infection in more controlled situations, in the
greenhouse and laboratory, to study the pathogens involved. And
also the same thing for the viruses; we needed to isolate them in
more pure form without so many complex complications, so we knew
what we were dealing with,
My interests gradually turned then into the study of
epidemiology and population dynamics of the lima bean root rot,
where the pathogens involved were primary Rhizoctor.ia solani,
pythium ultimum, and Fusarium solani, the three maj or fungi
causing foot distress in quite a number of vegetables, although
the bean plant was a good host to study their actions on.
62
Lage : So you studied them in the controlled lab or greenhouse?
Kendrick: We began to turn to the laboratory and the greenhouse.
Lage: Was that happening in other areas of the experiment station, or
just your project? Was this kind of a trend?
Kendrick: I think it was a trend, although the staff of the experiment
station, even those working with citrus and avocadoes and lemons
and dates, were field- oriented. The experiment station, because
it didn't have any teaching obligations, I think spent more time
in the field with the field problems than perhaps our northern
California colleagues. The activities of the experiment station
people at Berkeley and Davis, at least to the extent that I
followed my father and his colleagues, were also field-oriented.
The gradual evolution, which I will get into a little bit later,
of becoming more laboratory- and greenhouse-oriented, was really
a consequence of the evolution of how you approached the solution
to the problems.
Establishment of the Air Pollution Research Laboratory
Kendrick: One of the great digressions as far as the citrus research was
concerned was the onset of air pollution damage to vegetables in
southern California. John Middleton in the mid-forties had noted
what he thought was air pollution damage, probably due to sulfur
dioxide, in the Long Beach area with its concentration of oil
extraction activities, refineries, and related industrial
activities. I guess I don't know particularly what the host was,
but celery was grown in that area, and it could have been some
celery or lettuce on which he noticed what he felt was perhaps
air pollution damage.
We had another flurry in the late forties, in 1948-49, of
calls into El Monte, Puente, and the Long Beach area again, and
fields that seemed to be blighted. And not just in isolated
areas but the whole field. We responded to that plea for help by
looking at them, and finally determined that there was something
in the atmosphere causing this problem.
Lage: Was it a difficult realization to make, or was it so different
from other types of blight — ?
Kendrick: Well, what made it appear to be atmospheric was that the whole
field would be affected uniformly. The nature of plant disease
is such that it's rare to get all the plants in the whole field
of sixty, or twenty-five, or fifteen acres affected similarly.
You find pockets of disease, because of the nature of the
63
Kendrick: distribution of the organism, even with airborne fungal or
bacterial blights. You don't really find all plants in the field
affected to the same extent. There are pockets where it's more
devastating than others. And you can trace that to the origin,
where the pathogen got started — either seedborr.e or in the field
or it's blown in from one section to another, so that there's a
gradation of severity. But in air pollution damage, you car. look
over the whole field and all plants seem to be affected
similarly. You quickly come to the realization that it's
something airborne and uniform.
Well, we were looking for mildews and fungal spore-borne
diseases, but isolations from the diseased material on the plant
didn't yield anything that seemed to be pathogenic. We'd get the
usual contaminants, but nothing that was very pathogenic.
So without too much scratching of our heads, we suddenly
realized that we had an air pollution problem, and then we began
to look at the weather records to see when the first notices had
come in relation to whether or not they were in the smog attacks.
And at that time, in the early fifties and late forties, air
pollution was beginning to become a problem in the Los Angeles,
Altadena, Pasadena, El Monte region of southern California.
Lage: There were already records of pollutants in the air?
Kendrick: Yes. Our department had a position authorized to assist Dr.
Donald Bliss, who was responsible for date diseases — date disease
investigations — and Armillaria root rot of woody plants. That
position was authorized to aid him in his investigation, and Dr.
Ellis Darley was employed to occupy that position, but because of
the severity of the air pollution damage we prevailed upon Dr.
Klotz and Dr. Batchelor to allow that position to be diverted to
work on the air pollution problem, because the problem needed
more help than John and I were able to give it. They allowed
that to happen.
So Ellis Darley joined John and me in our air pollution
studies. Around that time we realized that we were dealing with
a photochemical reaction way beyond both John's and my training.
We were interested in getting some controlled environmental
chamber studies to reproduce the disease. We were also aware
that Professor Fritz Went, a plant physiologist at CalTech, had
developed what he called a phytotron. That was at that time, in
the late forties, the ultimate in controlled environmental
chamber studies. Everything inside was sterile. The only
variations were the varied environments created to study plants
and plant growth. One could only enter the chamber by changing
clothes and dressing in a sterilized uniform, putting hats on,
walking through disinfectants. It was quite an ordeal to get in
and out.
64
Kendrick: So. we early collaborated with Went to set up some experiments in
the phytotron at CalTech. but we needed somebody to pay attention
to them, and that's where we asked Ellis Darley to join us.
Ellis spent some time in Pasadena and traveled back and forth to
Riverside.
It became apparent that we needed to trace what we were
dealing with and we were aware of the fact that a member of the
biochemistry department at CalTech. was Dr. A. J. Haagen-Smit.
Lage: He's mentioned in one of our other interviews as chairman of the
state Air Resources Board under Governor Reagan.
Kendrick: That's correct, he was. At the time — this was in the late
forties, '49 — he had come to CalTech from the Hawaiian Pineapple
Institute, where he had been working on the chemistry of aromatic
flavors. He seemed ideal to seek help from because he knew
something about volatiles and their chemical reactions. So we
established a relationship with Haggy, as we called him, and
engaged his interest in this air pollution problem. He's the one
that really pushed us a quantum leap ahead. It was through his
knowledge of aromatic aldehydes and highly unstable oxidar.t
aldehydes, and their origin, that we realized we were dealing
with a photochemical reaction between the hydrocarbons from
gasoline and ozone in the atmosphere, which produced the
ingredients causing the damage that we were noting in the fields.
So, John and Ellis and I set up some fumigation chambers ir.
Riverside and began trying to reproduce some of the damage we
were seeing in the fields. We spent a good deal of time the next
two or three years pursuing that, trying to establish some levels
of concentration and exposures and conditions of predisposition
that made plants susceptible, and trying to determine what plants
were not susceptible to air pollution damage. We did that with
the vegetables; we were not engaged with citrus and tree crop
studies at that time.
That ultimately led to quite an established area of research
at Riverside, and ultimately to the establishment of the
statewide Air Pollution Research Laboratory, which was headed and
directed by John Middleton. I determined about the mid-fifties
that pursuing air pollution damage was kind of a dead-end street
for me. I was more interested in the pathology of plants and
realized that I was not trained well enough in biochemistry and
the physical chemistry required to study and solve air pollution
damage. I also was not interested in just testing the reaction
of plants to air pollution damage for the rest of my career. So
I said to John, "You take the air pollution business, and I'll
get back into vegetable pathology, and we'll both proceed happily
beyond that."
65
Lage: That's very exciting to be in at the beginning of something.
Was this a new field? Was this the first time that it had been
studied, or did you have literature to fall back on?
Kendrick: This was a new cause of air pollution damage to plants. The main
literature we had to fall back on was S02 damage studies. There
was a center of air pollution research in Salt Lake City and in
Provo, where Moyer D. Thomas was employed by — I think it was U.S.
Steel Company. U.S. Steel had a plant there. They were being
sued by growers for plant damage associated with steel
production. They established their own research laboratory to
sort out how much damage they were responsible for, and how much
was other kinds of plant damage for which they didn't have any
responsibility. They were trying to partition out degrees of
responsibility, so they could sort out the liability.
You have to realize that the Fontana Steel Mill was in close
proximity to Riverside, and they were beginning to get all kinds
of claims against them. They were not a clean industry; they
were emitting pollutants, pollutants you could see. There is a
big difference between smoke and the kind of plant damaging
pollution that comes out of a number of sources.
We were becoming the experts in plant damage due to air
pollution. I was not terribly comfortable with that because it
was still a big guessing game as to what degree of responsibility
was due to Fontana and what might be due to what was blown in
from Los Angeles. The American automotive industries were not
particularly accepting of their responsibility for the plant
damage from gasoline and its incomplete combustion in car
engines. The Stauffer Chemical Company was quite helpful to us.
They provided free of charge the chambers that they had given up.
They had assembled their own research in the Long Beach area when
they were being pursued because of some claims about sulfur
dioxide damage to plants, and they made some studies to determine
what it was they could reasonably accept responsibility for. I
don't know the outcome of the suit, but it was a subject of
litigation.
But the chambers that they gave us, and the set-up to expand
them into a useful laboratory experience, really was quite a
development as far as Riverside was concerned. On the basis of
our studies, we determined that if we were going to do greenhouse
studies for viruses or other kinds of plant studies, we could
only do it if we filtered the air through activated carbon filters.
This eliminated the airborne plant damaging toxicant. That also
became a requirement for the phytotron in Pasadena because plants
were being damaged inside the phytotron by some mysterious
visitor, in spite of requiring people entering the phytotron to
go through procedures to prevent contamination of the plants
inside. Nevertheless something was escaping and damaging plants.
66
Kendrick: At the time we were doing those studies, Professor [Albert]
Ullrich, then from the department of soils here on the Berkeley
campus, was on a sabbatical leave to study environmental
influences on the growth of sugar beets and sugar production. He
has always indicated that we kind of came to his rescue by
studying air pollution in that area and determining that they had
to filter the air through the deactivated carbon filters, in
order to provide an atmosphere that did not contain the oxidant
that would damage plant growth.
So it was kind of exciting to be in the forefront with these
air pollution studies, but I was willing and happy to turn it
over to the chemistry investigations. That was also my first
association with Jim Pitts, who came to Riverside when the
college was established. He was a professor of chemistry at the
time, and his area of expertise was in physical chemistry and in
photochemistry. It was natural that he would be interested in
the photochemistry of reactive free radicals in the atmosphere.
Sabbatical Year at Cambridge and Rothamsted
Kendrick: That pretty well covers my research. I renewed my interest in
soil fungi and pepper viruses which led to a sabbatical in 1961-
62 in Cambridge University, where I sought to spend some time
getting refreshed in the dynamics of root pathogens. One of the
pioneers of root disease studies was located at Cambridge
University. He had published a book or two on the topic, and I
sought to associate myself with him for a year. His name was Er.
Dennis Garrett.
So I applied for a fellowship from the National Science
Foundation and was fortunate enough to be granted a senior
postdoctoral fellowship for the year. I had also determined that
I would like to spend some of the year at the Rothamsted
Agricultural Experiment Station in Harpenden working with Dr.
Eric Buxton.
Rothamsted is in about thirty minutes from London. It is
quite a famous agricultural experiment station going back several
hundreds of years. It is really the agricultural experiment
station in England.
Lage : Somehow I think of them as being uniquely American.
Kendrick: No, agricultural experiment stations as such are German. The
concept that we developed in this country came from the German
institutes of agriculture. They laid out these experiment
stations. England augmented and exploited the idea, but some of
67
Kendrick: the early work was done in soil chemistry — chemistry of
fertilizers. The Rothamsted Experiment Station has a famous
field experiment in which they have had the same regime of
fertilizers and cropping practices for over two hundred years.
It provides a valuable data base for what will happen, and it's
produced a lot of information.
The time at Cambridge proved to be somewhat of a
disappointing experience as far as my research plans were
concerned, because when I found what facilities were available to
study population dynamics of Rhisoctonia rising and falling under
various kinds of regimes, I found that they didn't have the
facilities to study in any kind of a statistical way the problem
that I had outlined. I made these arrangements by letter to
begin with, and was somewhat misled by Garrett. Although he was
a marvelous person to discuss things with, I found that his
experiments were pretty well confined to his laboratory bench
with one or two plants from which he'd make all his observations
and draw quite inclusive conclusions. The same characteristic
existed with his greenhouse experiments. I was accustomed to
setting up three to four hundred petri dish plates and make
readings to get some kind of comfortable statistical feeling of
occurrences or nonoccurrences of the organisms that I was
studying. I found that if I used 400 petri dishes in this
laboratory, I'd use up the whole week's supply for the entire
department. [laughter]
So I had to readjust my expectations relative to the kind of
study I could make, and I found that what I gained most from that
experience of nine months was an exposure to the kind of
analytical thought process of the Cambridge scientist and the
companionship of the research students who were a part of that
botany department. Plant pathology was not a department at
Cambridge; it was part of the botany department. Our family
formed a very close personal relationship with three advanced
graduate students during that period. I really cherish those
relationships, one of which we carry on pretty closely even
today — the Robert Witbread family. They are in Wales. He is a
member of the University of Wales, located at Bangor.
There were three of these young men (Bob Witbread, David
Punter and Roger Waistie), who were not married at the time, and
they ultimately became more than j ust acquaintances because they
looked after us. Through them we experienced university life in
Cambridge in all its broad aspects, and they experienced American
family life in our home. (It was at least what we called home,
and what the English call a semi-detached duplex, which was two
dwellings with a common wall. That's why it was semi-detached.
Detached on three sides, but with a common wall in the center.)
68
Kendrick: They would come to our home periodically to visit, to have meals,
and we'd travel some together. That was an unheard of
opportunity for English students because with their own research
advisors at Cambridge, the relationship between the advisor and
his student was very formal and somewhat distant. We, being the
visiting Americans, were much more informal, and there was less
of a gulf between teacher and student.
David Punter is now in Canada at the University of Toronto,
and Roger Waistie is back in England at an experiment station
near Scotland after a number of years at a research station ir.
Indonesia. It may actually be in Scotland.
This was quite an impressionable year. It gave me renewed
confidence and experience in dealing with soil-borne fungal
pathogens, and I came home from that experience with the feeling
that I was really going to get into the population dynamics of
root-rotting organisms that were borne in the soil. This was
kind of an expanding field at the time. I also had a similar
experience of stimulation in Harpenden at the Rothamsted
Experiment Station. The thing I was appreciative of ir. that
opportunity was that it placed me in the company of stimulating
minds. We didn't always talk shop, and the topics ranged from
foreign policy to politics and sports. At Cambridge, through
another contact I had from Riverside in the chemistry departnent,
I was introduced to a physical chemist (Howard Purnell) who was a
fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He arranged to have me
accepted as a visiting fellow at Trinity Hall, which gave me the
opportunity to experience some Cambridge college life such as
dining at the high table with the fellows, and having
conversation and sherry or port in the commons room with the
fellows after dinner. I could easily understand how that
stratified life of Cambridge and Oxford perpetuates itself,
because it is a very pampered life for the faculty who are "in,"
but not necessarily so for those who are students.
A lasting experience for me was that I was often challenged
to explain American foreign policy or American attitudes. I was
the only American who was a fellow at this small college at that
time. Trinity Hall was primarily oriented towards the field of
law. The master of the college had had something to do with
writing the constitution of several of the former colonies of
England. So the American really was fair game for a lot of
challenges — not necessarily criticism, and I at least was asked
to explain and justify the stance of the United States
government. I felt at times like I was defending something I
didn't have my heart into.
Lage : Sounds like an unfair advantage, with all these people schooled
in the 1 aw.
69
Kendrick: That's true, but as I reflected back on those encounters, it was
a great experience, because I'm not really comfortable just being
a passive observer of current events, and I'm not shy about
debating a point wtih somebody, particularly if I've got the
knowledge and a basis to support the argument.
Then, when I went to Harpenden. to Rothamsted, I was thrown
in amongst another group of challenging people. We used to have
lunch together, brown-bagging it, either at a local pub in
Harpenden or else in the laboratory. My experience there
occurred during the period of the Bay of Pigs. The English were
very critical of the United States action in the Bay of Pigs,
particularly in remembering how their attempt at controlling the
Suez Canal early on was condemned by the United States, as an act
of unf or give able ness. They wondered how come we (the United
States) had a double standard. Well, defending the Bay of Pigs
was not very easy to do, particularly since I didn't know
anything about it.
Lage: I've heard other people say that they were put into that
defensive position, whereas if you were here, you might be
leading the criticism.
Kendrick: That's quite correct. But it placed me in a position of the
lawyer who has to defend someone because they come to you and you
know they're guilty but you've got to see that their rights are
protected, and not condemned through prejudice.
But we hit it off quite well. When I finished my leave
there, my colleagues at Rothamsted gave me a hand-written
pictorial scroll that was described as an honorary degree in
debating. [laughter] I've got it hanging in the other room. I
thought it was a nice tribute. They respected me for defending
things that were almost indefensible and admired the fact that I
could hold my own — they were all graduates of Cambridge or
Oxford, with no lack of ability to engage in that kind of debate.
Lage: Where did all this social life leave your wife, or did she have a
stock in all this? Sounds very male.
Kendrick: You're quite right; it was very male. England then was very
male. Our children were nine and eleven, and we were determined
that we would have them experience the English school system.
Janet was the eleven-year-old, and Douglas was the nine-year-old.
Evelyn spent most of her time taking care of shopping, and being
sure that she was there when the children needed her. The period
when I was in Rothamsted, which was the last three months of our
stay in England, we did not want to change schools for that time.
So we left her in Cambridge and I took our little right-hand drive
Opel (and a right-hand driving country is a thrill in itself). I
would go down on a Monday morning and come back on a Friday
70
Kendrick: afternoon. And while at Rothamsted, I stayed in what they called
the Manor House. Rothamsted really was an expansion of an old
estate, a major estate. The Manor House was the original owner's
home, and it was quite a large home. It had been modified to
take care of visitors who were there for periods of time. I was
fortunate enough to get a room for the three months that I was at
Rothamsted.
That also provided another opportunity to become acquainted
with visiting West Indians, Australians and Jamaicans. Rothamsted
was a magnet for visitors from all over the world who would come
through and want to see the renowned staff of the experiment sta
tion, as well as some of the famous plots. It has an illustrious —
good history of early work in the agricultural research field.
One of the things I remember not too fondly are the meals
that we had at Rothamsted. Evelyn will remind me of this every
time we have brussels sprouts. I was there during the winter
period, during the season when brussels sprouts seemed to be
forever available, and they prepared brussels sprouts in the
Manor House kitchen by boiling them for what seemed to be most of
the day, before serving them at the evening meal. They were
absolutely awful. It was the principal vegetable. Brussels
sprouts and boiled potatoes. It was not a menu that I remember
with any degree of fondness. On the other hand, the meals at
Trinity Hall were quite good.
These graduate students I referred to earlier saw to it that
we went to the college events, the parties, which had a lot of
tradition associated with them. The school terms I never could
get sorted out exactly correctly. At the start of my leave, we
arrived in March and discovered that the term was ending and
there was going to be about a three-week recess, when everybody
disappeared. That period was going to be a waste of time, so we
quickly changed our plans and went touring on the continent for
three weeks. We did France and Italy and Austria. The students
advised us of some places to visit, which we appreciated. We
really felt quite fortunate — we'd pop in and out of places and
did our own tour, in our little Opel with the four of us. We had
quite an enjoyable three weeks and saw a lot of places that are
now commonplace stops on most organized tours.
Later in the year in October we took another three-week
sojourn onto the continent, and we did the northern half of
western Europe. We visited Sweden, Denmark, northern Germany,
and Holland at that period. And that was a delightful time of
the year, too. In both instances, we were able to travel with
not too much congestion from other people, so we didn't really
plan a lot ahead for our accomodations, we just stopped when we
were ready to stop, although we did do some degree of planning so
we wouldn't be stranded.
71
Kendrick: That gave us a good appreciation for that part of Europe and
flavored the whole year. We saw a lot of cathedrals, and during
the period that we were in England we traveled fairly extensively
on weekends, to cover that country. We got into Wales and to
Scotland and saw cathedrals and manor houses and were well
exposed to the magnificent art. We didn't pass up many art
galleries. I think we gained an appreciation of the exquisite
nature of the original paintings. Both Evelyn and I had had the
usual exposure to art history in grade school by looking at the
pictures in books. But there is nothing that will impress you as
much as seeing an original. I think that really kind of turned
us on in that area.
The kids were a little impatient with us; they were zipping
in and out of the Louvre when we were there. Their primary stop
was a souvenir stand. [laughs] I could hardly drag them away
from a souvenir stand in Pisa. I wanted to go up the Leaning
Tower, and they wanted to buy something.
Lage: Typical, that hasn't changed.
Kendrick: No. But that sabbatical was really a mind-clearer. I had gotten
so involved with campus committees and one thing and another that
I needed a separation from all of that business. I really came
back all charged up to become a good plant pathologist, and
quickly got diverted. But we'll get into that.
That sabbatical, it turns out, and subsequently the work
engaged in after returning was about the end of my research
career. In 1963, I became chairman of the department. (We'll
back up a bit, and get into that a little bit later.) As
chairman of the department — it was a fairly large department and
it was undergoing expansion and growth — I found an increasing
demand on my time to engage in administrative matters and campus
affairs. While I attempted to carry on research programs with
research assistants, I really knew that I was fighting a losing
game. Ultimately, I just gave in and let the research slide.
But it was not planned that way.
I wanted to comment on one of the major research efforts
that I engaged in prior to going on the sabbatical leave. It was
done in the Imperial Valley where I was pursuing the problem of
cantaloupe crown blight. Working rather closely with a biochemist,
a colleague of mine (Randy Wedding), put us into the field a good
deal of time. We had quite extensive field plots, trying to
uncover the fate of root development and root destruction under a
variety of different treatments — water regimes, varietal differ
ences. That was not a very fruitful piece of research. We accumu
lated a lot of data, but were never able to come to any real
conclusion as to what the cause was, and ultimately we decided it
was another one of those complexes that we needed to unravel.
72
Promoting Riverside Faculty Unity and Camaraderie
Kendrick: During my early years at Riverside, the department of plant
pathology was physically dispersed among four different
buildings. This made it difficult to operate as a department
because there wasn't enough in common to bring us together. I
can't remember ever having a staff meeting, or any kind of event
that was departmental-oriented, except when we would gather at
the KLotzes' house once in a while for socials and conversation.
Dr. and Mrs. KLotz were good about that; they kept that part of
the operation going pretty well. But in a professional sense,
there was nothing that brought it together.
It was not until 1954, when Webber Hall was built and we
were able to bring the department under one roof in one central
location, that we began to feel a little bit more like a unit
with a common purpose, and not a dispersed group of individuals.
The first place I was housed was in the soil science department
in Riverside, across the hall from Dan Aldrich. That began
another association which had a decided influence on my outlook
and activities.
That was not my first association with Dan, because we were
in Professor Benjamin Dugger's plant physiology course at the
University of Wisconsin, as I have indicated. But Dan had
finished earlier and had come out to join the Riverside Citrus
Experiment Station in about 1944. Let me interject here that,
although the department did not have any kind of common focus,
the Citrus Experiment Station did. It had a major event which as
I look back on it appeared to be created by a stroke of genius.
It brought this large family together and provided an opportunity
to at least develop for those of us who were really a part of
that early staff, some esprit de corps in terms of being a part
of the Citrus Experiment Station, and allowed us to overcome the
feeling of isolation from the university which the physical
location promoted.
And that focus was a regular meeting of what was called the
Synapsis Club. The origin of that term is genetic and means
"coming together." It describes one of the phases of cell
division and cell multiplication, and represents what happens in
the nucleus with the chromosomes, they come together before they
are split apart. I don't know who to give credit for that naire
because by 1947 it seemed to be already a well-established
meeting of members of the staff and outsiders who wanted to come.
There was always a single speaker, who would describe some work
activity that he or she was doing. It was pretty well attended,
and you were sort of expected to go to a Synapsis Club meeting.
At least if you were absent, your absence was noted and you were
asked, "Well, how come you weren't at the Synapsis Club?"
73
Lage: And how often did this take place?
Sendrick: I think it was once a month. I don't think it was any more often
than that. It certainly was not once a week. But that event was
really I think rather important to the unification of the
Experiment Station and provided at least a means of getting
acquainted with other than your immediate colleagues. There was
a certain amount of socializing through the Campus CLub. The
Campus Club was really run by the spouses.
Lage: When you mention the Campus CLub, are you talking about the
period after the College of Letters and Science was established?
Kendrick: No. The campus club was there before. I don't know when it
first started, but it was in existence when we arrived. It was
an activity that the wives encouraged, and they were instrumental
in developing Christmas parties and summer picnics.
I wanted to talk about my association with Dan Aldrich, who
was located right across the hallway from the laboratory which I
shared with Henry Schneider, also a plant pathologist — the twc of
us were in the soils department building. The fact that both Dan
and I had been at Wisconsin briefly together led us naturally
into an early association, but he was hard to miss anyway —
friendly, vigorous, and active, just a natural leader, as his
subsequent career at the University demonstrated.* We found
commonality in our families and social life. Evelyn and I did
not have any children at the time; the Aldrichs were just
starting their family; the Middletons had part of their family.
The Zentmyers, I believe, had their family started at the time we
first met them.
At any rate, in a social sense the Middletons, Zentmyers,
Aldriches, and Kendricks became a social group who would get
together at Thanksgiving and at other times of the year. So
aside from being professional colleagues, our families enjoyed
each other and participated together in social events.
The expansion of the Citrus Experiment Station brought to
the staff younger people who felt that they needed more activity
than just horseshoes at noontime.
Lage: Al Boyce talks about the horseshoe game.
* Aldrich went on to become chairman of the Department of Soils
and Plant Nutrition, Davis and Berkeley; University Dean of
Agriculture; Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine;
and Acting Chancellor of the Riverside and Santa Barbara campuses.
74
Kendrick: Yes. It became quite an ongoing game, I'll tell you. I
participated myself a few times, but I was never in it with those
old guys who could toss ringers all the time. But we determined
that we really needed a faculty club. And Dan Aldrich was a
principal mover. Nothing stood in his way of contacting anybody.
If he needed to call Dr. Wellman or Dean Hutchison or Bob
Underbill or whomever, it was just a phone call as far as he was
concerned. L. C. Cochran — who was with the USDA, and another
plant pathologist at Riverside joined in helping this movement.
As a graduate student, Cochran was acquainted with my father at
Purdue. It's a small world when you are dealing with people more
or less in the same profession. L. C., as we referred to him,
was placed by the USDA in the Department of Plant Pathology at
Riverside to pay attention to stone-fruit trees and their
diseases. Ultimately, he spent a good deal of his time with
viruses of stone fruits.
But L. C. had also determined that we needed the physical
presence of a faculty club. So L. C., Dan and I, and the
others — George Zentmyer, John Middleton — conceived of developing
a faculty clubhouse. To obtain the capital for its development
we sold bonds to ourselves and the CES staff. We located a
building at Camp Haan which was available as an army surplus
building. It had been a nurses' recreation building, with the
usual single-story barracks-type architecture. Camp Haan was
located across the highway from March Air Force Base, about five
miles from the Citrus Experiment Station. We determined
that if we could get that building moved onto some spot on the
Riverside campus property, that we would have a physical
structure, which we could put together and convert into a
clubhouse. But we needed permission from the Regents to do that
sort of thing. That's how Aldrich became a prime mover in
contacting the secretary of the Board of Regents, who was Bob
Underbill at the time, and getting support from the local
administration plus Dean Hutchison, who was in Berkeley. Dan
carried that out with tenacity and effectiveness.
When the administration discovered that we were really
serious about doing this sort of thing and had raised the coney
to buy the building, they said — I don't know who "they" were,
really — but they said they would allow us to develop that
building if there would be an auditorium in it, because the CES
needed some expanded meeting space. The smaller auditorium in
the main Citrus Experiment Station building where we were holding
the Synapsis Club meetings was needed for office space
expansion — so the administration said that if we would allow them
to have some meeting space in the reconstructed building, they
would help us move and relocate it in a more convenient place
than originally planned. We saw a bargain in the making, and we
accepted the agreement.
75
Kendrick: So the present location of what is now called the University dub
is located centrally on the campus just north of the soils
building. Well, we arranged to have it moved by a moving
company; it had to come in in five different sections, moved down
the highway. The University agreed to pay for the construction
of the new foundation, which was performed professionally. After
the sections were lowered onto the new foundation, the staff of
the experiment station proceeded then to put it back together.
We'd have work parties to do that in our spare time. We had some
technical help on how to connect things and how to get the wiring
done right by the local maintenance man, Henry Meyer, whom Boyce
referred to in his book. He was really the prime professional
advisor on this project. But all the manual labor, the hammering
and the sawing and the like, were provided by the staff on work
parties primarily on weekends and after working hours. We put it
back together again.
We determined that we needed a fireplace, so we bought a
large iron heatilator and surrounded it with a lot of concrete
and granite from the western part of Riverside County. The
heatilator provided the correct drafting which a fireplace should
have. This fireplace is a monument to perpetuity because we put
so much granite and cement into it that I expect it will be there
almost forever.
Lage: They'll never move it again.
Kendrick: Because Aldrich was close by — he lived just across the highway
from the experiment station and I was without family — we found
that the two of us from time to time would be the only ones out
there during a Saturday work schedule. We've been identified as
the ultimate architects, or workhorses, who put that fireplace
together.
One Saturday, we were trying to lay brick for the chimney on
the roof, and we were having difficulty lining it up in a
perpendicular way. The chimney began to lean a little bit.
Lage: [laughing] The leaning tower of Pisa.
Kendrick: And the more we tried to straighten it out, the more it leaned.
We tried to adjust for the amount of mortar we were putting in
between the bricks. And finally, it was so frustrating that we
stopped and Dan said, "Look, we're getting nowhere. I have a
friend who's a bricklayer. Why don't we ask him to finish this
off?" I said, "That's the best idea I've heard yet, Dan. Let's
do that. Let's stop this nonsense because if we're not careful,
it will just crumble on us."
76
Kendrick: So that was what happened, and to this day you can see where we
left off and a professional took off, because the chimney goes up
at an angle and then it all of a sudden straightens out. It was
finished off in a great way.
Another thing we did for which I have a lot of fond memories
is that we formed a vocal quartet. Our social events in the
experiment station were self-motivated, and entertainment was
provided by our own participation. The chairman of the soils
department was Homer Chapman, who put himself through school with
a little dance band for which he was the piano player, playing by
ear. He could play almost anything that somebody would hum to
him, or for which he had some kind of a notion of what the melody
was. He put all kinds of chords to the melody — he was a
marvelous piano player. He's still living. So he was our
accompanist.
Another colleague, a man in plant pathology, Merrill
Wallace, had the talent of rhyming almost any subject. (Merrill
was our principal lyricist of our original songs.) So many of
our songs were parodies of known events and people. This quartet
kind of got thrown together with no planning — it just sort of
happened. It consisted of Aldrich, Zentmyer, Bob Harding, now
deceased and a colleague of Dan Aldrich's in soils — and me.
Zentmyer was a quite capable baritone, could harmonize easily; I
sang second tenor and had choral experience and knew a little bit
about harmonizing around a tune; Aldrich was not very musically
inclined but he could carry a melody so we said, "Dan, you sing
the melody. Don't worry about us, we'll harmonize around you;"
and Bob Harding had a good bass voice, knew quite a bit about
harmony, and could hold his own. So because the three of us knew
a little bit about and could read music, and had choral
experience, we just let Dan sort of free-wheel it.
Lage: He sounds like he was good at that.
Kendrick: He was fairly adept at it. And surprisingly, we sounded pretty
good, especially if we could get Homer Chapman playing loudly on
the piano and covering up mistakes. We also made up for musical
deficiencies by appearing in costume, so we would — depending on
the subject matter — get up in some outlandish costumes, and
divert people's attention from the choral niceties by the words,
which were usually appropriately composed by Merrill. Then we
began to branch out. We appeared to be having so much fun
singing that we were asked to appear at Christmas affairs, or
lead the Cal fight song in choral groups, or student groups, or
at Charter Day banquets and the like. We sort of became known as
the Faculty Four Plus One, at a number of events which were
scheduled in town.
77
Kendrick: To augment the original parodies, we tried to seek out little
ballads which were not common or well known. Besides these we
liked to sing the famous Yale Whiffenpoof Song, which was really
beyond our capacity level, although we finally became pretty good
at it. We sang a little ditty that came out of a book of folk
songs, probably of English origin, called "No More Booze." Our
repertoire also included "Careless Love," "Cruising Down the
River," and the usual, other barbershop quartet songs that were
easy to harmonize.
Our ultimate experience with this sort of thing occurred at
a fundraiser put on by the Junior Aid of Riverside, the
forerunner of the Junior League of Riverside, at an event in that
city. The Junior Aid engaged a producing company in New York to
come out and produce a follies in which the local talent was used
in a whole array of single episodes involving duets and songs,
comedy skits and chorus lines. The Junior Aid follies needed a
quartet. So Dan's wife, Jean, who was a member of the
organization at that time, said, "Well, why don't you get your
quartet down there and try out for this sort of thing?"
Well, we said, "Sure, we'll try out," and we did, and were
selected. So for two years running, we appeared in the Junior
Aid Follies in the municipal auditorium in Riverside, which for
two nights running had about 1,200 people in attendance.
Lage: This was big time!
Kendrick: It was big time, and we figured we couldn't top that, so we just
stopped appearing after that. [laughter]
Lage: Are you the group that Boyce refers to as teaching the new
undergraduates the various Cal songs?
Kendrick: Yes. That actually was in the Boyce book, but it is in Dan
Aldrich's account of the development of Riverside — yes, that's
the group. But we did have a lot of fun, and I think that the
reason that it stands out in my memory is because of the success
of those events where your colleagues see you in a different role
than you're usually performing. I think the success of the
Faculty (Hub Christmas party here at Berkeley is due to the fact
that it's a faculty-participation event, and the more you get
away from the self-developed capacity to entertain yourself, and
replace it with professional entertainment, the more you lose
faculty unity.
All of those events promoted this kind of faculty unity and
camaraderie that were important in setting a tone of unity beyond
your department and your own special interests.
78
Lage: Now what time period are we talking about? When was the Faculty
dub built?
Kendrick: We built that about 1949. Dan left Riverside in the early
fifties to move to Davis, to become the department chair there,
so all of this was in the late forties and early fifties.
Research Studies in Plant Pathology at the Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside.
•
Jim Kendrick and John Middleton in
Chula Vista celery field, 1949.
Virus studies, 1952,
Smog chamber studies, 1953. Left to right: Middleton, Kendrick,
Ellis Darley.
79
IV TRAININ3 GROUND FOR A UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR:
RIVERSIDE CAMPUS GOVERNANCE
Establishment of the Undergraduate Liberal Arts College
[Interview 4: September 17, 1987] //#
Lage : Today is September 17, and our fourth interview. We're going to
continue with the University of California at Riverside today.
Kendrick: The other things besides research that engage and occupy a
faculty person's time are the committees and special assignments.
Being a person who, at least, is not reluctant to participate in
committees of one kind or another, I naturally became involved
with departmental committees and the like. Those are fairly
minor; they just give you a flavor of learning to operate in a
collective sense and addressing issues that affect more than
yourself.
The real change in these kinds of activity was really
associated with talk about expanding Riverside from an experiment
station into a teaching college. So the latter part of the 1940s
was when the expansion, potential expansion, of an undergraduate
teaching program came into being at Riverside.
Lage: It was talked about that soon, back in the postwar years?
Kendrick: Yes, in the late forties, '49, '50. As a matter of fact, Provost
[Gordon] Watkins was appointed to chair a committee that was
studying the potential establishment of an undergraduate teaching
program in the southland. Ultimately, the Citizens' University
Committee — a committee that came out of the Riverside Chamber of
Commerce, composed of interested Riverside citizens — was
instrumental in persuading the Regents that the Riverside campus
was a likely spot to locate one of the teaching campuses of the
University. At the time of the activity of the Citizens'
University Committee, one of the important members of that group
was Philip L. Boyd, who was a businessman and a former
80
Kendrick: assemblyman representing Palm Springs and surrounding area. He
was a property developer and investment advisor. Phil Boyd was
later appointed to the Board of Regents and served effectively
for about twelve or fourteen years.
But he, like his colleagues who were citizens of the
community, felt that Riverside had the space to accommodate an
undergraduate college, and he was quite active in trying to
persuade not only the legislature but the Regents of the
University and the administration that that was an obvious place
to expand the University's offering to undergraduate education.
That was the period, too, when the University, during the latter
part of Robert Gordon Sproul's presidency and under succeeding
President dark Kerr, was planning for rapid expansion.
As I recall, during the very early fifties when all of this
talk about the potential expansion into a teaching campus was
going on, there were mixed feelings among the experiment station
personnel about whether or not that would be such a good idea or
not. I had described earlier that it was a fairly comfortable
research environment. There was not much to interfere with
working on the problems in which you were engaged. Scheduling
field experimentation was not complicated by other demands on
your time, and therefore the experiment station staff had a lot
of field experimentation underway.
With the decision by the Regents that the Riverside campus
would indeed become the site of a college of letters and science,
things began to change. In the very early fifties, Provost
Watkins, Gordon Watkins, who I think at the time was dean of the
College of Letters and Science at UCLA, was appointed provost of
this new fledgling college. He moved to Riverside to begin to
assemble the faculty and leaders of the various segments of this
new college. A number of things began to happen. Facilities had
to be built for the new college and a wholly new faculty had to
be recruited and assembled. All of that took time. So the
influence of that activity was not all that obvious to those of
us who were relatively young in our associations with the
University, but nevertheless it had an impact.
Lage: It didn't affect most of you as far as taking on a teaching
obligation?
Kendrick: No, because we were not going to be teaching undergraduates. The
program design of the undergraduate program under Watkins1 s
leadership was to be a small liberal-arts offering, patterned
much like the Swarthmore of the West or Reed College. It was
going to be essentially an elite, small, intimate undergraduate
letters and science offering. They did not envision having a
graduate program at all.
81
Kendrick: So the four or five people who were employed by the University
under Watkins's direction assembled their faculty with the same
kind of expectations in mind. You want to recall that
simultaneously the Davis campus was declared also to be the site
of another college of letters and science. The same was to
happen at San Diego, which had been the location for a long time
of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's long and illustrious
activity with the University of California. It had a little more
graduate training involvement, but it did not have an
undergraduate program.
So the three campuses were being developed as undergraduate
letters and science teaching campuses along about the same time.
Santa Cruz and Irvine came on slightly later, but not much. It
was a great period of expansion for the University of California.
Everyone involved previously with the University was not without
some effect of that expansion.
I recall that my own view about the likelihood of developing
an undergraduate program at Riverside was one of approval and
enthusiasm. I felt that it would bring a challenge to the
environment and introduce a broader life of the University than
we were experiencing as kind of an outpost of the University.
Part of that, I think, was a holdover of my memories of going to
Davis and seeing a full-fledged campus, even though it was an
agriculture campus, and my experience at the University of
Wisconsin, plus the fact that I had done my undergraduate work at
Berkeley, although agriculture was a very small part of the
campus. So I viewed the expansion into liberal arts with some
degree of enthusiasm. In reflection, I think that there was some
over— expectation, but nevertheless we'll get into that a little
bit later.
Lage:
Kendrick:
The undergraduate college at Riverside was to be developed
within four principal divisions: Ed Coman, the librarian and a
member of the team of planners, was employed early to begin
assembling a library; a division head for the physical sciences
was appointed, Conway Pierce; the life science program was to be
an integrated program and Herman Spieth was identified as the
leader for that; the humanities area was to be put together by
John Olmsted; and the social science program was to be put
together by Arthur Turner. Overall, with the dean of the
college, who was Robert Nisbet, they became the principal
architects of the faculty that was assembled for the college.
Were they all drawn from the University of California?
No. Herman Spieth came from New York, I think the City College
of New York. Conway Pierce came from Pomona; Robert Nisbet came
from Berkeley; John Olmsted, I think, from UCLA, I'm not sure.
82
Kendrick: Arthur Turner was a Scotchman, and I don't really know where he
came from. There was also a physical education component, and
Jack Hewitt was asked to develop that program.
Those men were mature, well-established professionals, and
they had an opportunity to become pretty well acquainted with the
existing experiment station staff. They participated socially
and were incorporated into the life of the campus at the time.
Provost Watkins was a very charming person, and his wife, Anna,
was quickly accepted by the community as a great asset, as he
was. He explained in very articulate terms what he had in mind
to provide a wonderful experience of undergraduate education.
The space that was assigned for these people to operate in
was an abandoned chicken coop up near the original director's
residence, so they operated under very Spartan circumstances.
But they proceeded, nevertheless, to develop the concept that
was well-meaning, but probably, in retrospect, did not have much
of a chance to succeed with the University's overall program.
The New Academics; Relations with Agricultural Researchers and
The Riverside Community
Kendrick: They did set the pattern for liberal arts education at the
University of California, Riverside, that has some residues even
today. The faculty that was assembled by them in these four
major undergraduate offerings for the most part were assistant
professors. They did not really plan to set their faculties in
motion by recruiting professors, associate professors and
assistant professors with an age spread so that there would be
varying representations of maturity and experience. So what we
had in those initial stages was a prominence of beginning
professionals in various fields associated with the liberal arts
and the physical and life sciences all assembled with the
expectation that they were going to offer a very demanding and
comprehensive liberal arts education at the undergraduate level.
You can imagine — maybe you can't — that that group of young
professionals arriving on a campus where there was a well-
established agricultural component of faculty and staff, mixed
about as well as oil and water. The agriculture program was
regarded by these young idealists in the liberal arts as less
than worthy of a rigorous academic program, and on the contrary,
the attitude of a great many of the agricultural experiment
station people was that these new assistant professors really
didn't know what life was all about, and that they lived in a
dream world. They didn't mind criticizing established
institutions, and this caused a certain amount of stir in the
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Ker.drick: community. They were questioning the establishment, so to speak.
Therefore, an academic tension really developed, not unlike the
traditional distance between the sciences and the humanities as
it exists or. almost any general university campus.
But in addition, because it was an agricultural group on the
one hand, all well established, and these —
Lage : And the difference in ages between the two groups played a role?
Kendrick: That's right, age did make a difference. Also the fact that this
new teaching activity had invaded some experiment station land
created a tension between two factions of the campus.
Although this is, I think, a fair description of the whole,
it certainly is not an adequate description of individual
relationships, because some of us were able to see the value of
social science and humanities in education and were willing to
accept the notion that others had a point of view that they were
justified in expressing. And that, in the long run, it would be
in the best interests of the development of the University's
offering on the campus to have a broadened program, although it
did interfere with the sort of single-minded dedication to
research that was aimed primarily in solving the citrus and
subtropical problems of southern California.
With the program which got underway formally with students
in 1953, a benefit for the experiment station — a tangible
benefit — was that Webber Hall was built. It provided for the
first time adequate physical space for the department of plant
pathology. It also provided space for the department of
nematology, and what was then called plant biochemistry.
Lage: So the experiment station was departmentalized, but the college
was organized by divisions?
Kendrick: That's right. The philosophy of that early college instruction
was an integrated education. It was illustrated by the fact that
the concept of an undergraduate education was not to be
compartmentalized; it was to be broad exposure to western
civilization and the arts and the social sciences, with a flavor
of the life and physical sciences and the humanities. For
example, there was no department of botany, and no department of
zoology or psychology. It was a division of life sciences, with
those components a part of it. Every undergraduate student had
to take a course in western civilization, I believe it was
called. It was basically a humanities course, which was team-
taught, but led by a couple of humanists. It was really a killer
of a course because students were expected to cover a massive
amount of material associated with western civilization or the
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Kendrick: development of western civilization in general. It included the
languages, as well as the cultural aspects and the political and
social structures.
It's interesting that today's reemphasis on undergraduate
education is restoring the place of humanities and social studies
in general education curricula. I think that to some extent it
was too bad that that experiment at Riverside failed. I
understand, however, that we just could not sustain the kind of
elitist education for a relatively small segment of students.
Lage: Why do you call it elitist?
Kendrick: Well, not financially elitist, but intellectually elitist. The
expectation of performance was really at the top of the grading
scale. The workload piled onto the students was massive. You
can imagine that new graduates, professionals, particularly
assistant professors, having finished their education in places
like Reed and Swarthmore and maybe Berkeley and UCLA and
elsewhere, designed their courses with a very strict yardstick
for performance. So that Riverside developed an early reputation
as a tough place to get through. So the elitist reference that
I'm making is not economic, but intellectual elitism strong in
culture, philosophy and thoughtful ness, but short on what you
really call a practical education by which to make a living.
That may be stretching the term "elitism" a little more than it
should be, but it certainly was an education for the few and not
the general.
One of our most famous early undergraduate students was
Charles Young [chancellor at UCLA], who was a member of the first
graduating class. He certainly does not prove my point, however.
He transferred to UCLA and majored in political science as a
graduate student — a "practical" education in one sense of the
term.
Fa c ul ty Organization in an Academic Senate
Kendrick: Well, I already made reference to the fact that physically the
plant pathologists, biochemists, and nematologists were much
better off by having that college come to town because we got a
modern building with adequate space in which to function. That
was quite a significant benefit as far as we were concerned. The
intangible development of this program meant that there had to be
some kind of a faculty organization, so that the Academic Senate
began to form, with all of its committee structure and apparati
that went along with that.
85
Lage:
Ker.drick:
Lage :
Ken d rick ;
It strikes me that having all these young faculty members would
be very difficult in terms of university governance, their not
having had experience with an academic senate model and faculty
committees.
You would have thought so, but they quickly acclimated themselves
to a self-governance posture. [laughs] And quickly they became
typical academic participants in that structure. Even though it
was small, it was easy to know most of the people who were the
faculty. And they gradually began to put together the standard
committees on educational policy, courses, budget, welfare, etc.
Lage:
Ken d rick :
And the experiment station was a part of this?
The
Not initially. That's a subject for another small chapter,
experiment station appointees, except for the chairs of the
various departments, were not members of the Academic Senate.
They did not have professorial titles. I mentioned that my
initial appointment was as a junior plant pathologist. The title
"junior" was comparable to an instructor rank at that time. The
next step up was assistant plant pathologist, which was
comparable to an assistant professor, and so on.
H
The heads of experiment station departments were granted
professional titles because there needed to be some academic
professorial oversight for the occasional graduate student who
was farmed out, so to speak, from Berkeley, UCLA, or Davis to
finish off a thesis program in residence at Riverside. So there
was a j ustif ication for a professorial representation of the
department, and that usually was a part of the chair's
responsibility.
So the department chairs took on a teaching role.
That's correct. And those chairs participated in the senate
development. You remember that I indicated that the bulk of the
faculty in the College of Letters and Science were young
assistant professors just starting out in their professional
careers. The majority of our chairs of the experiment station
departments were old hands, experienced in [laughs] life and
their profession. So there was some built-in conflicts of points
of view.
The zealous enforcement of rigorous academic contributions
and original work held by the letters and science faculty was not
exactly compatible with what the experiment station leadership
felt was the proper contributions from their research programs,
because a lot of research was field-oriented and of practical
nature. So there was room for disagreement on justification of
86
Kendrick: advancements. I'm just talking about things in general, not any
specific cases that I remember, but I want to lay the foundation
of what led to much of the conflict between personnel in the CES
and the college. The mixing of a small liberal-arts
undergraduate offering with an established agricultural
experiment station program sounded like a good idea to the
citizens of the city and to the administration as they needed tc
advance and expand the offerings of the University, but it was
not anything more than a shotgun marriage as far as the people
who were engaged in this were concerned. And it's important to
realize that because that element of disagreement between the
early liberal-arts faculty, some of whom are still at Riverside,
and the experiment station personnel, some of whom are also still
active at Riverside, continues to exist even today. As the
campus grows in size I expect this conflict to become only a
memory.
Lage : Are there more experiment station people now involved in
teaching?
Kendrick: Well, yes. And most of the experiment station people have
academic titles. A lot of the young faculty who were assembled
in the liberal letters and science department have gone to other
places. There has been a change, but I could still feel the
tensions of trying to marry a liberal arts activity with a very
practical experiment station program when I was vice president.
Lage: Well, it also seems to go on in the Berkeley campus. Henry Vaux
talked about problems getting the Academic Senate budget
committee to recognize the practical needs of the School of
Forestry as they chose their professors.*
Kendrick: Absolutely. That's very true. I think it's sort of built into
the academic traditions of a campus that has professional school
offerings as well as the letters and science and liberal arts
education. I think it's unfortunate, but you find that extremism
exists. I call it academic snobbery — expressed symbolically by
the following bit of academic folklore: "What I'm doing is basic
research, but what you're doing is applied research." That
attitude comes to the foreground every once in a while. And it
gets expressed in peer evaluations, particularly if you are
operating (as you've said Henry has described it) in a budget
committee where the representation on a small committee is
usually overbalanced by academic peers from letters and science
versus the practical subject matter departments. Well, all that
existed at Riverside also.
* Henry J. Vaux, Forestry in the Public I?-terest; Education.
Economics, State Policy. 1933-1983. 1987.
87
Development of a Graduate Program
Kendrick: Another thing happened that was important in the development of
the Riverside campus, which changed things. While the early
years of the letters and science, liberal-arts education was
steaming along in pretty good shape, there was an undercurrent of
unhappiness developing with the program in the physical sciences,
particularly in chemistry and physics, under Conway Pierce. The
unhappiness stemmed from being limited to only undergraduate
education. In the sciences they realized that they had to have
laboratory research to publish in reputable publications, in
order for them to advance. To do this research, they needed
help; they needed assistants.
At the experiment station at Riverside we needed assistants
too; we couldn't do everything ourselves. So our resources were
invested by and large in what we would call laboratory
technicians. They are today referred to as SRAs, scientific
research assistants. So it became the expected pattern for
researchers at the CES at Riverside to have resources not only
for our own salaries, but also for travel and equipment and other
supplies and expenses. Each member of the experiment station
located at Riverside had a minimum of one technician and some of
us had one and a half, two, or more. So we had essentially a
mini-research laboratory or staff. On those campuses with
undergraduate and graduate education, those resources went into
research assistants, and those positions were occupied primarily
by graduate students. So those support funds contributed to
teaching. That was a major difference in the way Riverside used
its support for research, in contrast to Davis and Berkeley,
which also had components of the experiment station where their
resources for the most part went into graduate programs with a
minimum number of technical assistants.
Well, coming back to the physical sciences, they looked with
envy at all the lab assistants we had on experiment station funds
for our research. They [the physical scientists] developed as
best they could an undergraduate research opportunity, which was
a marvelous teaching technique. The advanced undergraduates were
able to get a little bit of money and, at the same time, help a
senior professor with a research program, and get introduced to
that kind of activity. It was not only a great teaching aid but
it was also a stepping stone for their own education and further
development. But that kind of assistance was not really enough
to satisfy the demand of the faculty in the physical sciences.
So, with the help of the life science group, they moved to
establish a graduate program at Riverside. That was the first
leak in the dam, as far as a small, undergraduate, exclusively
liberal arts education was concerned.
88
Kendrick: They were helped in their efforts by those of us in the
experiment station who felt that we also would enhance our own
program by broadening it and elevating its quality by having
graduate programs in the agricultural sciences that were
represented at Riverside. So ultimately, that change was made,
and a graduate division was established at Riverside. The first
graduate dean, as I recall, was Ralph March, who was a professor
of entomology.
Lage: Was he part of the experiment station?
Kendrick: Yes. So as I say, that was a break in the concept of
undergraduate liberal education at Riverside. And it was the
first instance where there was a joining together of experiment
station personnel and a portion of the letters and science
original faculty for a common goal, to establish a graduate
educational program at Riverside.
Lage: Do you remember what the date would be?
Kendrick: Well, it would be in the late fifties or early sixties. I think
chemistry probably had the first accepted and recognized graduate
program. It is a major undertaking to develop a graduate
program. It is not enough to just declare your interest in
graduate programs. You have to jump through a lot of academic
hoops in the process. Curricula and courses must be designed and
developed. They must be accepted by the graduate council.
Financial support must be sought from the administration. So it
took a lot of doing to propose what you would offer as a graduate
program before it was ultimately approved and recognized.
Finally, the successful departments would be given authority to
train graduate students for the Ph.D.s and/or masters degrees.
You had to do more than just declare that you're interested ir a
graduate program.
These early graduate proposals had to be fought through the
local campus educational policy and course approval committees,
which was not easy because of the committee domination by faculty
from the social sciences and humanities. Professors in these
fields were not thrilled with graduate programs coming into being
to interfere with their emphasis on the undergraduate education.
But the steamroller was underway, and it ultimately prevailed.
[The Graduate Division was established in 1961.]
I had great enthusiasm for the potential development of the
graduate programs because, from somewhat of a selfish point of
view, I felt that the quality of research in plant pathology
would improve immeasurably if we had the stimulating experience
of training students, particularly graduate students. For one
thing, I felt that it would prevent the kind of narrcv emphasis
that a pure research program tends to develop because, when you
89
Kendrick: begin to study more and more about less and less, you don't have
any other challenges. But if you have to offer a course in a
subject once in a while, you have to get out and find out what
the rest of your professional world is all about. And I felt,
and it was shared by a number of my colleagues in the department,
that our whole program would improve.
I don't think we realized quite as much at the time just how
much it would interfere with our devotion of time to the research
program, but that seemed to me a small consequence to pay for
improving the quality and academic stature of the program. So I
was an unqualified endorser of the graduate development.
The other thing that happened with the development of the
graduate program in the agricultural sciences was that it
legitimized the expansion of the professorial titles for
experiment station people. If you became involved in designing a
program of instruction or supervising graduate students, then
that qualified you for an academic title in addition to your
experiment station title. And that meant, then, that you had
full license to practice in the other part of academic life, and
that was participating in the Academic Senate activity.
Well, that was also a goal. I felt that if we were going to
be a unified campus, we had to have as much participation in the
total life of the campus and not carry a we/they — those of you up
on the hill, and we down here in the former walnut orchard —
attitude. So that the senate provided an opportunity under this
expanded program of graduate instruction to meld together some
more of the faculty activities. There was a great expansion in
the early sixties — '61, '62. '63 — of people in the experiment
station being granted academic professorial titles.
Lage : Did that create a problem? Were the personnel at the experiment
station all suited for this academic title, having been hired
just for research? Did they then get evaluated again to see if
the academic title — ?
Kendrick: I don't recall that the academic titles were evaluated by the
budget committee, but there was an evaluation. It may have beer,
administrative. It was based not on research as much as whether
or not one was engaged in instruction, either through supervising
graduate students or in charge of seminars, or offering formal
courses. There was no qualification relative to whether or not
the kind of research you were doing qualified you for a
professorial title. As a matter of fact, if that criterion had
been applied to the early assemblage of the letters and science
faculty, not very many of them would have qualified, because they
were not research-oriented, and they had a very scant record of
having had much accomplished. Most of them were just out of
school and had done a thesis problem, and that's about the extent
90
Kendrick: to which they had contributed research. As a matter of fact,
because it was not a research-oriented group of young faculty,
they ultimately had difficulties advancing in their professorial
ranks, and that I'll come to a little bit later because I had
some personal experience and involvement in that aspect of some
of the campus life at Riverside.
Directing the Design for a Physical Master Plan. 1959
Kendrick: My title as professor came along about 1961. It was at that
point that I became even more thoroughly exposed and engaged in
some of the Academic Senate activities. Prior to that, one of
the major assignments given to me in 1959 was to chair a small
committee to plan for the expansion of the Riverside campus to a
student body size of 5,000 in the first phase and to 10,000
students as a second phase, including both graduate and
undergraduate education. Chancellor Herman Spieth who succeeded
Provost Watkins as the chief campus officer asked if I would
chair that effort. I spent most of 1959 on that assignment, with
about six other colleagues. Chancellor Spieth appointed me as
special assistant to the Chancellor for the assignment.
I accepted that appointment not knowing anything about
physical master planning, and there was not much history
available to draw upon, nor was there anybody at Riverside with
any knowledge about how one goes about drawing up those physical
master plans. But I quickly determined that I'd better make
contact with the physical planning office of UCLA and gain as
much information as I could from that institution. I spent a
good deal of time associated with George Vernon Russell, who had
been appointed earlier as the supervising architect for the
Riverside campus.
The experience of trying to formulate a basis for how many
students one might expect to enroll in your graduate program, hew
many undergraduate students will be there, how many you're going
to provide a physical residence for, and what offerings might
expand, was really an education for me.
Lage: So you were concerned with the physical development as well as
the program development, is that correct?
Kendrick: Well, the charge of the committee was to design a campus plan to
physically accommodate a student body of 5,000 students by 1970,
I guess. And to not ignore the fact that it might go to 10,000
students in another decade. So our charge was primarily to
design a physical plant, but we could not design a physical- pie rtt
without having some sort of notion of what the academic planning
91
Kendrick: was to be about. So I would not start with a physical plan
without an academic plan in hand because you can't plan a
physical plant without knowing what you're going to put into it.
Lacking an academic plan that addressed itself to how many
students were going to be about and where they would be, we had
to dredge up that information as a forerunner to being able to
design classrooms and classroom sizes, and whether the physical
sciences were going to have more students than the social
sciences or the life sciences or what have you. So we had a lot
of spade-work, so to speak, to do in consulting with those
departments and getting their best estimate of where they thought
they were going to go. The whole plan really was predicated on
the basis of a lot of wishful thinking, in terms of existing
faculty and chairs. But we nevertheless produced a plan — I've
still got a copy of it here — that I don't think existed very long
with any great degree of authenticity, but it certainly provided
a useful education for the seven or eight of us [laughter] who
spent a great deal of time endeavoring to produce a master plan.
That particular activity began to introduce me to people in
the systemwide administration because I had to do a lot of
consultation away from Riverside to understand how one approached
the planning effort. It also introduced me to the concept of
space standards and how much space you develop for a graduate
student versus a research lab versus a library versus this that
and the other thing. So all the nomenclature of university
activity became somewhat familiar to me, with these activities.
Lage: It sounds like the kind of job that would be given to a
professional planner, rather than to a group of faculty from
different fields.
Kendrick: That is absolutely correct. And I learned and became acquainted
with a number of professional planners in my travels.
Lage: Were they put at your disposal?
Kendrick: No; well, not really put at my disposal, but I was given leeway
to go and visit with them, and —
Lage: You didn't have a paid professional at your side?
Kendrick: No paid assistants at all. This was taken right out of the hides
of — I was given essentially half-time relief from my research
duties to do this sort of thing. The rest of the committee was
not. They met on call, and we had a lot of called meetings.
Riverside did not have a professional planning unit. They
did not have a lot of resources in the administration to do this
sort of thing, so much of the activities came right out of the
92
Kendrick: hides of the faculty whom the leadership could find willing to
take it on. I must say I did it without really realizing how
much effort and time I was going to get into and just how
ignorant I was about that.
Lage: You must have learned a great deal.
Kendrick: I emphasize this experience because it was my initial
introduction into beginning to understand the University as a
whole, compared with just the Department of Plant Pathology in
one small unit in an isolated area of the state.
That activity just about finished me off. I was becoming so
involved with that as well as some other administrative
committees that I sought a sabbatical leave. I determined, as I
indicated, that I wanted to go to England to spend some time with
Dennis Garrett, a lecturer in plant pathology in the botany
department at the University of Cambridge, who was an authority
on root disease pathogens. I had also determined that I would
like to spend some time at the famous Rothamsted agricultural
experiment station in England, at Harpenden.
Lage: So that puts your sabbatical leave in the context of what was
going on in your life at the time.
Kendrick: Yes, I expected it to kind of clear the decks and separate me
from all of those non-research activities. In the latter part of
1960, I applied for a senior postdoctoral fellowship with the
National Science Foundation and was granted one. I was quite
thrilled to receive one because it provided the wherewithal for
me to take a year off and take my family to England, with the
subsequent experiences of rambling a bit around England and the
rest of Europe. That sabbatical was taken in 1961 and '62. and
was at an odd part of the year. We left in February and came
home at the end of February in "62. I think that I said I cace
home with renewed enthusiasm about becoming a plant pathologist
once again and making some satisfying studies in an area that I
felt was deficient in knowledge, that being the population
dynamics of soil-borne pathogens, and trying to understand the
relationship of microbiological populations to the incidence of
pathogenesis and the subsequent severity of the root diseases.
Chairman of the Department of Plant Pathology. 1963 ##
Kendrick: I returned from England to Riverside in March of 1962. In the
meantime, my father had become ill and was really not well at
all. A number of years earlier he had developed cancer of the
93
Kendrick: larynx and had radiation treatments, so his voice was somewhat
raspy. But emphysema was gaining ground on him in early 1962,
and he ultimately succumbed on May 30, 1962.
My father's death is still quite vivid in my mind because I
was with him in the hospital when he expired. We had become very
close by that time. He was following my career with a great deal
of interest and encouragement. I had just become a professor of
plant pathology by that time. He followed my activities, but I
hadn't yet emerged into any leadership role.
The chair of the department through this period was John
Middleton, my colleague of long standing. We continued our close
consultative type relationship through his chairmanship just as
we did in our various research programs: some things we did
together and some things we did apart, but we were always in very
close communication. So throughout his administration of the
department, I was kind of unofficially involved in sitting in for
him when he was absent, representing him on various departmental
assignments when he had other things to do. We talked a lot
about how we would like to see the department develop in terms of
new positions or changed positions which we felt were necessary
to augment our course offering and research agenda. So I felt
very close to some of the administrative activities of the
department.
By that time, John had become almost totally interested in
the air pollution program and was pursuing that with a great deal
of vigor. It was in late 1962 or early '63, that the university
followed his advice and established the statewide Air Pollution
Research Center at Riverside, with him as director. He perceived
that he really could not be the director of the statewide Air
Pollution Research Center and chairman of the Department of Plant
Pathology simultaneously, so he resigned from his department
chairship. After Dean Boyce consulted with the departmental
faculty, he found no serious opposition to my succeeding John, so
I became the chair of Plant Pathology in the fiscal year
beginning in July of 1963.
That, as I think I mentioned, really marked the beginning of
my withdrawal from a very active research role, but it was not an
action that withdrew me from teaching. I was able to develop an
advanced graduate course in plant pathology theory, which I
enjoyed and felt that I got about as much out of it as the
students did. But it did introduce me into another phase of
university activity and administration that proved to be valuable
later in some of the other responsibilities that I assumed.
94
Academic Senate Work; Educational Policy, Personnel, Planning
Kendrick: With the professorial title and the department chairmanship.
there were innumerable opportunities to engage in senate
activity. By that time, the Riverside campus had succeeded in
separating itself from the paternalism of the UCLA campus and was
a freestanding division of the Academic Senate in iself. Through
this time period, the senates on the various campuses had
undergone an evolution and developed into separate divisions.
When I first started my activity in this area, there was a
northern division of the senate and a southern division of the
senate. The Berkeley campus was the nucleus of the northern
division, and the UCLA campus was the nucleus of the southern
division. UCLA, Irvine, San Diego, Riverside, and Santa Barbara
were part of that southern division, and the rest of the campus
faculties were part of the northern division. That was a
necessary first step, I guess, in trying to organize the senate
so that it could operate with some degree of efficiency. This
organizational structure was a forerunner to the Academic
Assembly. The Assembly was established to bring representatives
from all divisions and University- wide committees into a single
body, so that a forum for meeting and representing the entire
faculty of the University of California in matters that were
appropriate could operate.
Some of the committees on which I participated were
educational policy and course approval and something called
physical planning — I was a natural for physical planning w ith all
the background I had in that earlier study. I did not serve or.
such committees as welfare, privilege and tenure, or any of that
nature. But I was active in the Committee on Committees'
affairs. My CES [Citrus Experiment Station] colleagues early
determined the importance of that committee for us so we took an
interest in its work. I had much help among some colleagues,
both in letters and science as well as the experiment station.
Randy Wedding, whom I had collaborated with in the cantaloupe
crown blight study and some other research in the field, was also
interested in the Academic Senate and its activities. He was one
of my most ardent colleagues in "senate-watching" (let's put it
that way). We tried to make sure that we were going to have
proper representation on the Committee on Committees, which was
an elected committee —
Lage: When you say "we," do you mean — ?
Kendrick: Colleagues in the experiment station is what I'm really saying.
Lage: What motivated your interest in the Academic Senate?
95
Kendrick: I don't really know, except that my nature — I have always been a
person who participated in the organizations in which I was a
member. One of the things that motivated my interest in the
senate was that it was apparent that the senate was involved in
the personal advancement and welfare of the faculty. I felt that
if the senate was going to participate to that extent in these
matters then we ought to be a part of that process. As I've
indicated, since the Committee on Committees was the unit that
appointed the memberships of the various committees, we — we being
Randy Wedding and Oliver Johnston, who was a philosophy colleague
of ours, so to speak from the other camp, and some other allies
and friends in the physical and social sciences — we determined to
influence the outcome of membership on the Committee on
Committees. By and large the faculty does not participate very
actively in senate programs. That's true on any campus.
Lage: Except in times of crisis.
Kendrick: In times of threats and crisis, then you have everybody turning
out. But there aren't very many such occasions; the sixties here
in Berkeley was a dramatic exception to my statement about
faculty disinterest. But the senate, nevertheless, is a
significant factor in the development of the University of
California, and that becomes obvious if you know what the senate
organization does. I figured that's where I wanted to spend part
of my time, in making certain, at least, that if things happen, I
would have a part in it, or an opportunity to express opposition
to some of the things that I took exception to.
So it was not unusual that I would become involved because
almost in all organization that I got involved in, some way or
other I found myself coming to the top. That's one way of
looking at it —
Lage: Doing the dirty work could be another way of looking at it.
[laughter]
Kendrick: Well, I guess I've always enjoyed being a part of the decision-
making process, let's put it that way. I'm not totally
acquiescent in having somebody else make up my mind for me.
Some of those activities in the senate gave me an
opportunity to become acquainted with other campus personnel with
similar assignments in senate activities. I recall being an
early alternate representative to the University-wide Academic
Senate Educational Policy Committee, and that exposed me to other
University campus people. I won't mention all of the activities
that grew out of those early senate activities, but they opened
up to me the University's activities in various ways.
96
Kendrick: One of the most significant senate activities that I found myself
involved in was on the Riverside Budget Committee, as it was
known in those days. It had virtually nothing to do with
evaluating the budget, but was an academic personnel evaluation
committee. I served a two-year period on that Budget Committee,
and the real challenge occurred that first year when all five of
us were new appointees. We had no holdovers, so we had to
construct some new ground rules in order to find out how to
operate and what to do. Service on the Budget Committee was a
real eye-opener. It's in that kind of committee that you begin
to see life in its raw state, and not in its glossed-cver state.
Because when you're dealing with peoples' future and their
compensation, true characters begin to show. You are able then
also to see, with not too much difficulty, good performances,
bluffed performances, and poor performances.
Lage : How were you evaluating individuals? Through reports of their
colleagues, or individual observation, or—-?
Kendrick: No, this was a typical personnel evaluation committee that met
and commented on the justification for advancement or merit
increases, as well as the decision to move to tenure. There were
five of us, representing the various activities on the campus. I
was the experiment station representative to all intents and
purposes. We had a representative each from the humanities, the
physical sciences, the social sciences, the life sciences and
CES.
The process starts by going through the roster of faculty,
including both the experiment station and the college,
determining those people who are eligible for conside ration, and
calling notice to that fact to their department chairs. We also
required the chairs to begin the process of putting together the
documentation supporting their recommendation if they were going
to recommend advancement, and putting together a justification of
why they were not going to recommend advancement, if that was
their decision. That process is a very complicated one because
the chair is supposed to consult among the senior members cf the
department, and together they make an evaluation. The chair is
free to make independent comments in addition. The routing of
the comments is through their respective deans, and the deans
must also make a recommendation and an evaluation of the material
they receive. If it's a recommendation for promotion, it
includes all the published work and evidence of activities, both
in teaching, in public service and in university service, in
which the individual has been engaged during the period of their
employment by the University.
For all significant advancements and promotions an
additional step was employed. We identified confidential ad-hoc
personnel committees which were appointed by the vice chancellor.
97
Kendrick: These ad-hoc committees received all the documentation concerning
the individual candidates, evaluated it, then made a positive or
a negative recommendation. This information was then returned to
the Budget Committee for another independent evaluation of all
documentations and recommendations.
The Budget Committee's recommendation was then directed to
the academic vice chancellor who acted on the information
received and his own judgment. The academic vice chancellor whom
I worked with was Thomas Jenkin, who had been a dean at UCLA.
He is now deceased, but he was a very beloved administrator who
came to Riverside with an extensive background in university
service and competence in political science, which was his field.
He was with Ivan Hinderaker at the time. During this period of
activity that I've described, Ivan Hinderaker was the chancellor.
He succeeded Herman Spieth as chancellor in 1964.
Well, we got through that first year of Budget Committee
activities. But that was a time-consuming program; even though
we didn't have a lot of cases to consider, it was a significant
load for the size of the campus and the amount of support we had.
But that experience provided, as I said, a good insight into
strengths and weaknesses of individuals and departments. We
passed on all the appointments, the level of appointments, and
advancements to tenure, as well as denials.
As I indicated, all that documentation arrives in the office
of the vice chancellor for academic affairs, and then they sent
it to the Budget Committee for review. For all promotions, as I
said earlier, we nominated an ad-hoc peer review committee for
each individual case, usually consisting of three to five people.
If we could not get the right mix of professional backgrounds for
a candidate's particular field locally, we went to the faculties
at UCLA or San Diego or some other campus in order to get proper
representation on the committee, so that we'd have somebody on it
who understood what the candidate's field was all about. Then
that committee made their report and filed it with the Budget
Committee.
Lage: In the comments you made earlier about the Budget Committee and
'life in its raw state," there seemed to be a lot of emotional
content.
Kendrick: Well, I indicated that it revealed to me for the first time
individuals' true characters. It became pretty easy to determine
when a weak case was before you because it usually was full of
voluminous extraneous material.
Lage: This would have been material put forth by the person's
department?
98
Kendrick: That's correct.
Lage: Not by the professor himself.
Kendrick: No, I didn't mean to imply that the individual was the source of
the fluff and the bluff. Although [laughs] that certainly
exists. But at all levels, and particularly at the department
chair and the dean's levels, it became fairly easy to sort out
strong cases from weak cases. Weak cases are not necessarily
characterized by a short synopsis. They are more likely to be
long and dreary and full of extraneous references,
overemphasizing the importance of certain kinds of activities
that had peripheral relationships with academic development. It
was also a revelation of who were strong chairs and who were weak
chairs. You could tell by the kind of documentation they would
let go through their hands whether or not you were dealing with a
person who really took their job seriously or who just passed it
on and made no great effort to spend any time supporting or
exercising any independent evaluation.
It also displayed another personality character not
necessarily associated only with university people. There are
more people than not who really wanted to pass the unpopular
decisions on to the next level and not make those unpopular
decisions themselves, where it should be made in the first place.
So we would be handed the unhappy circumstances of denying
promotions in cases where the department chair or even a dean had
said, "I think this is a worthy case, and I recommend it."
Lage: Probably knowing full well it was full of fluff.
Kendrick: Knowing that the Budget Committee and the academic vice
chancellor would ultimately have to come to grips with it.
The second year of my Budget Committee work, I chaired the
Budget Committee, so it became my responsibility to organize and
see that things ran smoothly. Things ran a little smoother the
second year because we had some holdover members and some
experience in the process that we had gotten into place in the
first year. But it just reinforced my point of view of academic
evaluation. That experience was invaluable for my subsequent
assignment as the vice president because I could understand where
the faculty was coming from and how strong administrators ought
to operate. As I'll get into a little bit later, I spent most of
my vice presidency trying to introduce a similar academic
evaluation system into Cooperative Extension. I think I
succeeded, but it was a long tough pull. We'll get into that a
little bit later, but the experience I had at Riverside with
academic evaluation for faculty I thought was valuable enough to
try and introduce to Cooperative Extension so that it would take
out the arbitrariness of administrative decision-making.
99
Statewide Senate Involvement
Kendrick: My Budget Committee service exposed me to university-wide budget
and personnel committees. I became acquainted with other budget
committee chairs from other campuses. As chair of your division
budget committee, you were an ex-officio member of the statewide
budget committee where we considered broader issues of public
policy. I remember one of the nagging issues that we had to
consider as a university-wide committee was whether or not to
approve the inauguration of a special salary scale for lawyers.
That was sort of the first chink in the armor, so to speak, of
standardized professorial salaries, irrespective of the
discipline. The lawyers were chafing at the bit because they
felt that they were being disadvantaged monetarily and were not
able to hire qualified people at the level of university
salaries. There was long and arduous debate in this university-
wide budget committee on whether or not it was good for the
university to recognize special needs as far as salary for
special disciplines was concerned. We had most law school deans
come and testify before us and try to persuade us to approve the
special salary scale and as I recall, we ultimately agreed that
perhaps they had a case.
Lage: Reluctantly, I'm sure.
Kendrick: It was very reluctant because it was most difficult for faculty
from, particularly, letters and science and the nonprofessional
disciplines to understand why a professor of law was any more
valuable to the institution than a professor of classics. And it
was really a hard swallow to recognize that if we wanted a
competent legal faculty, we had to compete with the outside world
for that competence and not just the internal academic world.
Well, it wasn't long before physicians were on our tail, of
course. To some extent, they already had a special salary scale.
I'm not going to dwell on this long, but the thing that I
remember about that early exposure was the fundamental difference
between the physicians and the lawyers. The lawyers ignored the
professional ranks of the faculty because they attached less
significance to rank than they did money. As a matter of fact,
they appointed all new faculty as acting professors. They didn't
appoint them acting assistant professors or acting associate
professors, they were acting professors. The way they achieved
tenure was to remove the acting after three to four years, and
then they became a professor at this rather enhanced salary
level.
As far as the physicians were concerned, they wouldn't have
anything to do with that concept. They weren't going to appoint
anybody as an acting professor of medicine; they had to start
100
Kendrick: back down at the assistant professor level [laughter] and jump
through the hoops, and advance through the regular academic
ladder. On the other hand they didn't mind paying an acting
assistant professor three times what a regular faculty professor
might be getting. Money was the most significant factor to the
physicians, but they held very tightly to the notion that they
didn't want to disregard the ranks in the professorial series.
That was an interesting revelation of points of view from two
significant professions within our institution.
The Academic Council
Kendrick: The next step in my administrative education occurred through a
lucky serendipitous act by the university-wide Academic Senate's
Committee on Committees.
I recall that Randy Wedding was the Riverside representative
to the university-wide Committee on Committees about 1966. Ke
called me from a meeting that they were having. I was ir.
Monterey at a professional plant pathology meeting, and he called
me to see if I would be willing to accept an appointment as a
member of the Academic Council.
I knew a bit of what the Academic Council was all about,
because from my various activities I had become aware that they
sat as the hierarchy of the Senate. I said, "Well, what does it
entail?" Ultimately, I said, "Yes, I'll accept that." So in
1966, I joined the council, and in 1967, with Professor Rcbley
Williams from the Berkeley campus as the chair, I became vice
chair of the Academic Council. The officers of the council are
also the officers of the Academic Assembly. So the chair and the
vice chair are also the chair and the vice chair of the assembly.
Lage: Is the council a smaller component of the assembly?
Kendrick: The council is composed of — I don't think this is exactly
correct — but its membership is composed of chairs of the
significant Academic Senate university-wide committees, such as
educational policy, welfare, budget, and graduate affairs, as
well as the division chairs of the campus Academic Senates.
There are nine divisions, and they each operate with a local
chairman. Those nine people are automatically members of the
council.
So the council is about fifteen people, with the chair and
the vice chair not representing any one of the committees or the
divisions.
101
Lage: Now, what is the council's responsibility?
Kendrick: The council rieets monthly. It's really the evaluator and
commentator on senate matters that must have total senate
attention.
Lage: Do they work with the president?
Kendrick: They work with the president. It's the major contact that the
President's Office has with the senate. The chair and the vice
chair attend all Regents' meetings, and have the privilege of
sitting at the Regents' table, but they do not vote. They're not
faculty Regents, but they are given the privilege of commenting
any time on any subject and they participate in all open and
closed and executive session meetings. The students chose to go
the other route. They wanted a student Regent. The faculty
decided that they really didn't want to be placed in a position
of having a single person represent total faculty point of view
[as a member of the Board of Regents], realizing that that's a
very difficult thing to do. So they chose the other alternative,
and that was to participate in all discussions, without feeling
that they had to vote. I think it was a wise decision, and I
think it's been a helpful decision as far as the Regents were
concerned.
Well, that was another step in my exposure to University
life. The chair and the vice chair of the Academic Council also
participate in defending the University's budget in Sacramento in
the spring, when the subject matter happens to be a faculty
topic, such as salary or teaching load. There are a surprising
number of interesting topics that the legislature gets into, and
the chair of the Academic Council usually dedicates the entire
year to being chair. Because during that spring, you could find
yourself tootling up to Sacramento four days a week for about six
to eight weeks during the University's legislative budget
hearings.
Lage: This takes you out of teaching and research.
Kendrick: They're provided with relief to do so.
That was not the case when I was the vice chair and Robley
was the chair. The involvement had not developed to that extent
at that time. I'm describing the chair and the vice chair in
more recent years as we've gotten into more complicated
relationships with the legislature. But the chair and the vice
chair were expected to participate in a lot of administrative,
system-wide committees, one of which was called the Building and
Campus Development Committee, chaired by Harry Wellmaru This
committee went from campus to campus to listen to the plea for
augmenting the budget for physical plant development, as well as
102
Kendrick: academic program development. It was sort of a traveling road
show composed of a number of administrators, plus the Academic
Council Representation — usually Robley and me — although we
attempted to divide up the workload, and I would go to some and
he would go to others. But that was the first regular assignment
that put me in touch with the president, but more particularly
with the vice president, who happened to be Harry Wellman at the
time.
In 1967-68, that Academic Council that I was a part of was a
very interesting council. Randy Wedding really caught the
Committee on Committees without having done their homework, and
so when it came time to consider chairs of various kinds of
committees that the university-wide senate was engaged in, he had
a candidate for each. Some of the other campuses didn't. So we
wound up that year with about five members from Riverside on the
Academic Council. This council that was representing the entire
University of California, had more than its share of members
including the chair of the graduate council and several other
representatives from Riverside — I'll have to dig out an old
picture of that council in order to remember just how many and
who they were. But I do remember Bob Gleckner was on it, and
George Zentmyer was on it, I was on it. Someone else also.
The other thing of interest about that council was that Bill
[William J.] McGill, from San Diego was representing his division
in San Diego, and Frank [Francis] Sooy was on it from San
Francisco. Subsequently — I'm going to jump ahead a little — but
subsequently President Charlie Hitch ruined that particular
council by selecting me to be the vice president Agricultural
Sciences, a little later Bill McGill as chancellor at the San
Diego campus, and, finally, Frank Sooy as chancellor of the San
Francisco campus. So it proved to be quite a fertile ground for
future administrators. With my former colleagues on the council
occupying significant administrative positions I felt that I w as
greatly advantaged early on in my relationships with most of the
campus chancellors.
•
The experience on the council and its subsequent linkage to
the system-wide administrative assignments gave me some
appreciation and flavor of what the individual campus
administrations were all about. I have always said that if one
had set out to design a training course for an administrator who
ultimately was going to have some system-wide responsibilities —
such as the vice president for agricultural sciences — I couldn't
have been better trained. Coming up through the whole system
with exposure to physical development, budget development,
academic development, and campus review of different units of the
university were important training activities. I had experienced
the growth and development of Davis through the eyes of my father
and observed the evolution of the Davis relationship with
103
Kendrick : Berkeley. Then I experienced again myself a the similar
evolution of a relatively small experiment station at Riverside
undergoing the introduction of instruction and graduate
development at that institution and our ultimate separation from
UCLA's oversight of Riverside's development — emerging, so to
speak, from adolescence to adulthood. So I think it was a unique
and invaluable experience to start off as a vice president with
that background. In spite of this when I arrived in Berkeley as
a vice president, I didn't really know what I was getting into.
Organization of the Statewide Agricultural Unit
Lage : As you went through these various steps, did you begin to have in
your mind that you'd like to move more into administration?
Kendrick: No, I really didn't. I w as really doing what came next. I was
aware that we had a system-wide administrative unit in
agriculture. I knew that Harry Wellman had emerged from that
role into the university's vice presidency role and was a very
significant administrator not only for agriculture, but for
campus developments, as President dark Kerr's right-hand person
in the expansion of the university's physical and academic
offerings.
Paul Sharp was the first free-standing director of the
Agricultural Experiment Station. He was appointed by Wellman, as
I recall. He traveled around and visited the campuses, and we
used to turn out like good soldiers and "let the captain review
his troops" when he would show up. But I was not really aware
that any of his actions had any really significant influence on
what I was doing at the time or what we were doing at the
experiment station.
We became a bit more aware of the university-wide
administration when Dan Aldrich moved from his chairman of the
soils department at Davis into what was then called the
University dean for agriculture. In Al Boyce's autobiography he
was mistaken in indicating that Aldrich occupied the resurrection
of the title. Harry Wellman was the vice president for
Agricultural Sciences, and when he moved out of that role, the
title was changed to University dean of agriculture. And at that
time, the University dean of agriculture really functioned as a
dean because all the courses and curricula that were developed by
the respective colleges had to have the dean's approval, had to
have Aldrich's approval.
10A
Kendrick: There was also a University dean of extension at the time, so
there were two University deans. It made a little more sense for
University Extension to have a centralized dean because there
really were opportunities for him to be concerned about the
curricula they were offering.
Aldrich also, to some extent, participated in determining
department chairs and new appointments. I remember when
Hutchison was the dean, he was involved in every aspect of
appointment, promotion, and department chair designation. But it
became increasingly difficult to operate as a dean with no
resident faculty and no resident students from University Hall.
And that title became somewhat obsolete. But nevertheless it
continued to exist during Dan Aldrich's tenure, and it also
existed during Maurice Peterson's tenure. He had been brought to
University Hall, I think by Dan, to be the director of the
experiment station, succeeding Paul Sharp. He operated in that
capacity early on until Dan Aldrich was appointed chancellor of
the Irvine campus.
So Peterson, an agronomist from Davis, succeeded Dan about
1963 or '64 as the University dean for agriculture. He, in due
course, brought Clarence Kelly, an agricultural engineer, down
from Davis, to be the director of the experiment station, and the
two of them functioned for some time as University dean and
director, respectively.
I became a bit more aware of the university-wide function
under that particular regime, although I followed Dan just
because we were close friends. Then when I was department chair,
I would see a little more of the university-wide administrative
unit in agriculture than the ordinary participant would.
When Pete resigned as the University dean of agriculture in
the early fall of 1967, Kelly was asked to perform both director
and dean functions. Those of us in the south sort of lost track
of the fact that we even had a University dean.
I am really answering the question that you raised of
whether, having participated in these other activities, did I
develop an urge for administrative work. At the time, we knew
that Al Boyce was going to reach retirement age as director and
dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Riverside. I had
been chair of the department for five years, and I really had a
lot of interest in how Riverside was to be developed. At that
point, while I was not aspiring to be the dean, I felt that I
ought to be considered strongly for that role, given all of the
other stuff that I had done at Riverside and my interest in its
development. There was a period when I was a bit disappointed
that I didn1': detect any activity jr interest in my being dear.
down there other than an occasional reference to it. So I was
105
Kendrick: somewhat frustrated, not realizing j ust how that was going to go.
I was interested in who might be dean, if it were not to come my
way. It wasn't a position that I aspired to, but it was a little
bit like I had felt about the chairmanship of the department. I
had enough confidence in my own ability that I felt that I was
competent to handle the position, at least as much as my
colleagues, if not more than most of them. And I felt somewhat
similar about the deanship; I felt that if I weren't given at
least a chance to be interviewed for it to give some ideas about
where I thought the college ought to go that that was an
oversight.
Well, as it turned out, the chancellor and Harry Wellman had
other ideas about my future, and I didn't know about them. That
explains a little the lack of talking to me about the deanship, I
think. I'm just guessing, because it's never been revealed to me
just what was going on in that time. But I had sort of lost
track of the fact that there was a vacancy in the university dean
position, and furthermore I was not a highly ranked administrator
nor an obvious candidate for a university-wide administrative
responsibil ity .
Lage: It was a big jump.
Kendrick: And to jump from a department chair to a vice presidency was
nothing that I contemplated. I thought that a natural evolution
for that sort of thing would be to take on the next larger unit,
and that in my case would be a college administration of some
kind. So we'll leave it at that.
Lage: That's a good place to stop.
106
V PLANT PATHOLOGY DURING YEARS OF CHANGE AT RIVERSIDE
A Collection of Specialties
[Date of interview: September 28. 1987] //#
Lage: We were going to start out today talking about the plant patho
logy department at Riverside and how you built up the faculty.
Kendrick: All right. The Department of Plant Pathology at Riverside was
kind of a traditionally constructed department, as were the
departments of plant pathology at Berkeley and Davis. What I
mean by that is that the personnel were traditionally trained
plant pa thlo gists who had gone to graduate schools in various
universities of the United States and had degrees in plant
pathology. Plant pathology is a profession, as I have
maintained, that is not a pure science. By that I mean that it
isn't narrowly focused like a chemistry department, which is all
chemistry, or a physics department, which is all physics —
realizing, of course, that there are various aspects of those
fundamental sciences that make them quite diverse too.
But plant pathology really is an amalgamation of a number of
microbiological departments that deal with the infectious nature
of the organism on a host plant. So that it's a profession that
deals with the interaction of parasites and biological organisms
which host them producing some kind of adverse event as far as
the plant host is concerned.
So in the early days, plant pathologists studied the
reaction of plants to these external organisms and tried to
prevent their adverse consequences. But as I've already
indicated, one of the adverse effects we noticed early on was air
pollution, and that's not an organism, that's a chemical that
causes a plant reaction which is plant damaging. There are other
kinds of chemicals that are either administered to a plant in
excess or they show up being deficient, which also produces a
plant that looks sick or not normal.
107
Kendrick: So plant pathology is really a collection of specialties whose
common thread is that you deal with a plant that looks sick or at
least does not look normal. As long as you're studying the plant
itself in these situations, it's understandable why you would add
to your faculty people trained mainly in plant pathology. As we
got into studying more and more of the whys and wherefores of
these adverse reactions to plants, it became evident that we
really needed to have people in the department trained in some of
these more narrowly defined specialties, so that instead of their
focus being directed to the plant they would pay primary
attention to the organism or the event that led up to those
adverse associations in plants.
So that was the beginning of breaking out of the mold of
looking for new faculty members only in departments of plant
pathology. We wanted to add chemists, microbiologists, and plant
biochemists to our plant pathology staff. This, I would say,
came into prominent consideration during the late fifties.
Lage: Was this a trend nationwide?
Kendrick: Yes. It was kind of a trend nationwide.
Lage: It wasn' t a controversial issue at Riverside, then?
Kendrick: No. One of the first people to promote this notion was Director
Al Boyce. Al was an entomologist dealing with insecticide
applications to control insects. He early on saw the necessity
to build up data on the chemistry of the insecticide residues,
and he sought to add chemists to the Department of Entomology, so
they developed a residue chemistry section. He ran into a little
controversy with the Department of Agricultural Chemistry in the
early days, because they felt that the chemistry associated with
pesticide application should be done in the Department of
Agricultural Chemistry; why put a chemist in the Department of
Entomology?
Al ultimately prevailed and added a chemistry section in the
Department of Entomology, which became quite renowned and famous.
He also added a section on the toxicology of insecticides, and
that was oriented heavily to biochemistry. We had a fungicide
section in the Department of Plant Pathology, and we saw a need
to have our chemistry section also, that is, Middleton and some
of the rest of us saw the need. So we sought a chemist to add to
the department in the mid-fifties, I think it was, when we were
dealing with a problem of citrus — postharvest decay of the citrus
fruit. We needed to understand the chemistry involved with the
fungicides and the residues that might be present on the fruits.
108
Kendrick: So the first breakthrough as far as adding faculty members
outside the tradition of plant pathology came from the chemistry
group in Entomology when a chemist. Marty [Martin] Kolbezen
transferred to our department to work as a chemist in our
postharvest decay program.
Lage :
It sounds as if there was a lot of team work. Is that correct?
Kendrick: Well, that's right. When you begin to branch out. then you need
to form teams of research efforts and not place all the responsi
bility on one person. You must have leaders of the team, but it
becomes a collaborative effort. It was easier to build collabor
ation teams when the members from these allied professions were
members of your own department, rather than a member of another
department where they have different allegiences and different
motivations in getting their academic work done.
Adding Specialists to the Department's Faculty
Kendrick: With that emphasis, then we began thinking about the physiology
of disease, and the microbiology of the organisms, and the
emphasis of the interaction of the organism and its host. John
Middleton and I, with agreement of the other members of our
departments, sought to add a man by the name of Solomon
Bartnicki-Garcia. Dr. Bartnicki was occupying a postdoctoral
position at Rutgers University at the time, working in Dr.
Waksman's laboratory. Waksman was a famous microbiologist, who
discovered some of the antibiotics that are in common use. Dr.
Bartnicki-Garcia seemed to be an outstanding candidate to study
the microbiology of some of the organisms that we were concerned
with, and we invited him to join the department.
That was really the first instance when we began to go into
the microbiology studies with the emphasis on the organism — the
study of the organism — with a specialist who had been trained in
the biochemistry and biology of the organism, rather than in the
more generalized training of plant pathology. I don't think Dr.
Bartnicki-Garcia had had any training in plant pathology per se.
Dr. Bartnicki was a native of Mexico, and I struggled to get him
off of student visa status into a regular immigration status.
There was a lot of activity associated with making him a legal
immigrant rather than an illegal alien. As a result of much
maneuvering and pleading and special contact with Immigration
Service, we finally arranged to have him enter the country
legally with a visa that had no termination date, by going back
to Tijuana and coming back through the border in this different
status. You never know as a department chair what sort of
problems you're going to have to deal with.
109
Kendrick: Anyway, Solomon appeared to be quite an interesting addition to
the department, he was very sharp and he brought a different
dimension of thinking to the group. He also was a little
irreverant of the older people in the department. So it took a
little doing to get him settled in, but I have always had a great
fondness for what he added to the department — embarking on this
rather broadened approach to plant pathology.
In the course of adding competence in our chemistry section
in the department, we added a person to the department by the
name of Bill Moj e (now deceased), who came to us from the
Department of Chemistry at UCF. His specialty was dealing with
the chemistry of natural products. We felt that it was necessary
to have an understanding of what the potential antibiotic
capacity of these natural products were, as well as an
understanding of potential resistance in natural products through
their own chemical barriers to infection.
Lage: You're going to have to tell me what you mean by natural
products.
Kendrick: Well, a natural product is — well, let's just take the orange and
the orange peel. If you tear apart the orange peel and study the
chemistry of the volatiles, the vapors you smell, or the juice
you squeeze out — that's natural product chemistry. Natural
product chemistry is the study of the chemistry of the banana
peel, or of the banana itself, or the orange, or the orange peel,
or the grapefruit, or the grapefruit peel, or the roots or the
leaves of plants, for example. It's not a study of the chemicals
per se.
Natural product chemicals have a lot of appeal in use to
control the bad bugs because they are naturally occurring in the
fruits and vegetables of plants in the first place. They're not
additives, and therefore they don't come under the category cf
additives, fungicides, or pesticides. They are more acceptable
by the general public because they do occur naturally. The
problem is that there are some very deadly natural product
chemicals. Just because they occur naturally does not
necessarily make them any safer. That's why you have chemists
who are natural-product chemists, who begin to unravel all that
kind of stuff so we can understand what we're dealing with.
Lage: It sounds as if you were concerned early on with something that
became popular much later.
Kendrick: Well, I don't want to take too much credit for this move, because
similar changes were occurring in the outstanding departments of
plant pathology in the U.S.
110
Lage: It seemed like a new concern later on, in the late sixties and
seventies.
Kendrick: Correct. But in the late fifties, we were already adding that
kind of competence to our Department of Plant Pathology.
We were also interested in the biochemistry of viruses, and
so we added to our department a young man by the name of Dr.
Semancik, who. while trained as a plant pathologist, had his
background pretty much in the biochemistry of virology. In other
words, he was studying the virus itself rather than the
interaction. And as you can detect in what I'm describing — we
were adding to our department people who tended to emphasize the
cause rather than the result of plant infection, and these new
members were skilled and trained in studying the nature of the
causal organism. We were probably, unbeknownst to us, backing
away from control. We felt that if we could understand the cause
better, we might be able to devise the control —
Lage: So it seems like a less immediately practical focus.
Kendrick: That's very true. Well, as it's now known and now described, we
were strengthening the basic research aspect of plant pathology,
somewhat at the expense of the applied research, which would have
more emphasis on the controlling part of plant pathology studies.
Lage: Was this change influenced by the beginning of the teaching
function also, or was it a separate trend?
Kendrick: No, I would say teaching had very little to do with it. It was
more influenced by the feeling of a few of us who were fairly
senior in the department that what we were doing previously was
emphasizing stop-gap control measures. They weren't lasting and
they weren't based upon any fundamental information. We felt
that, in fact, this move would lead to a more consistent control
of the diseases that we were concerned with.
This reemphasis began with Middleton and I followed on — John
and I did a lot of consulting together — Dr. Zentmyer, of course,
was part of this strategy group and subsequently he was the
department chairman after I left. But there was no real
resistance in the department to this move, and the departments at
Davis and Berkeley were moving somewhat in the same direction.
We could also see that the departments in Wisconsin and Cornell
had both moved in this general direction, so we weren't as unique
in this as it appeared locally. We probably had more pure
chemistry in our department at Riverside than they had in some of
those other departments, however.
Ill
Kendrick: With the addition of Semancik, the study of virology and the
study of the viruses itself took a big spurt, and moved forward
in good order. The last appointment I made which added a
broadened dimension of research in the department was Noel Keen,
who came from Wisconsin. He was trained as a plant pathologist,
but his emphasis was on the physiology of disease, strongly
oriented towards the laboratory study of what is going on in the
plant when infected by an organism. He studied the physiological
changes that occur inside the plant during the courses of infec
tion and subsequent disease development. So that added another
competence to this group of chemists, biochemists and virologists.
Trend Toward Over- Specialization; Need for Redefinition of the
Field
Kendrick: By 1968, when I had bid adieu to it, the department was a pretty
broadly based department of competencies and specialties that
complemented one another and covered a gamut of things involved
in the diseases of plants. I thought that was a fairly forward
way of looking at things, but it came at somewhat of a price of
less emphasis on the applied nature of plant pathology. My
concern about plant pathology as a profession today is that the
whole profession has gone that way.
Lage : Into specialization?
Kendrick: Into specialization. You go to a professional meeting nowadays,
and it looks like a collection of an applied biology and
chemistry sections. The kinds of papers and the thesis research
are very specific, quite detailed, and very biochemistry-
oriented. Not very much attention is being given to controlling
the nature of what is going on in plants after these events get
initiated. So I think that the profession needs a redefinition
of what it is that keeps it together in the first place. In my
view, it is a profession that is uniquely capable of studying the
interaction of biological systems that result in an adverse
consequence for the plant, the host plant. If there isn't some
attention at redefinition of emphasis to this interaction and an
effort to control, or at least ameliorate, the adversities, then
there really isn't anything in common to hold the profession
together. It's just a collection of specialties.
The departments have an important role in that because if
they don't emphasize that, the profession can't change it,
because the profession is a collection of people who like to go
the meetings and talk to one another. So I really think the
departments, and particularly those in California, have a real
challenge to try and restate what plant pathology is about.
112
Lage: I've heard from people in other disciplines that team research is
difficult to sustain. People get involved in their own projects,
and it's hard to keep a team approach going. Have you heard of
that in plant pathology?
Kendrick: Yes. I'm glad you brought me back to that topic. That's one of
the most difficult evolutionary steps in this whole business.
The recognition of accomplishment is really what sustains this
whole academic community. It's not the monetary rewards that
keep people going in the directions they go; it is recognition.
There is a certain monetary aspect to that because that
recognition also results in promotions and movement into tenure
and the rest of the things that are associated with the academic
community. So recognition is all- important.
When you have a team of more than two people — three, four,
five, sometimes six, eight, or more — it is difficult to identify
and partition recognition among that team, as to who did what and
how important this person was to that team, or somebody else was.
This is particularly true in California, the University of
California, where the recognition is evaluated by your peers ir.
the Academic Senate. Co-authored papers are not given as much
weight as single-authored papers, where there is no question
about who is responsible for what has been written or cl aided.
I've seen a big difference in recognition depending on whom is
the senior author, and it also makes a big difference whether
you're at the tail end of that string of authors, or whether you
are the second or third or fourth person.
All of that mitigates against team research. That becomes a
difficult problem for an administrator, to look forward to my
career as a vice president. The Division of Agricultural
Sciences, or its successor, the Division of Agriculture and
Natural Resources, is put together to solve problems,
agricultural problems, and the problems are not pure single-
science or single-discipline problems. They cross boundary lines
of departments; they cross boundary lines of locations; they
cross boundary lines of subject matter. So the problems don't
orient themselves in a way that single departments can alone
solve them.
What you have in the academic community is a system for
partitioning recognition and giving credit and identifying
creativity that becomes very difficult in these team efforts.
One way of solving that sort of thing is to tackle a big problem
with a big team, and if you plan it correctly, you partition off
the resultant descriptions of accomplishments and papers and give
different members of that team the opportunity to be s« nior
113
Kendrick: authors. But it's an incompatible system; there's no way around
it. The bigger the team, the more difficult it is for
recognition to be granted equally to all the contributors.
We had a further complication in our department, after
having gone the route of trying to move out into other
disciplines and add them to our department. A case in point were
the two chemists who had, from our perspective, helped us very
much in our approach to understanding the diseases and the
organisms causing them. But when it came time to evaluate those
chemists, in terms of their contributions, if their publications
were too oriented into plant pathology, the chemists, pure
chemists, who sat on their ad-hoc committees wouldn't give them
very much credit for that kind of contribution because they
weren't really contributing to chemistry. As plant pathologists
they weren't given all the credit they should be given either,
because their contributions weren't really very fundamental plant
pathology; it was more chemically oriented.
So they were caught in between professions, where the
chemists either tended to disown them because they weren't
contributing to fundamental knowledge in chemistry, and the plant
pathologists wouldn't really claim them because they weren't
contributing to the fundamental plant pathology. And that was a
problem. I think they ultimately suffered a little bit in the
academic progression through the system, although we chairs
prevailed and they ultimately got along pretty well.
But it's another irony of the academic system, that it
really functions best when you are studying a very minute section
of a very discrete discipline, where your peers can really get in
and understand what it is you're doing. The broader-based you
become, the more people are involved in collaborative efforts,
the more obscure these evaluations become. So it presents a real
challenge to the system. We were able to get through it, but
it's not something you can weigh or measure well, any way other
than in an abstract way. Anyway, I don't mean to imply that
plant pathology was the only department at Riverside that was
moving off in that direction, but I think it kind of helped lead
the way.
Graduate TeachinR Program Initiated, 1962
Kendrick: The teaching program, centered largely in the graduate studies,
was initiated in 1962. That was a significant event for our
department, one that I promoted with a lot of enthusiasm with the
help of my colleagues. There was really not any identifiable
resistance to that of which I was aware. I don't mean to claim
114
Kendrick: that I am the only one that really brought it through because in
the latter part of 1962 I was on sabbatical leave. The
groundwork was laid with John Middleton during his chairmanship,
and we were all anxious that we be fairly recognized as a
teaching department, with the subsequent augmentation of our
titles into the professorial series, so that we became a part of
that teaching faculty.
Lage: Did everybody in the department join the professorial ranks?
Kendrick: Not at the same time. It was granted rather piecemeal, depending
on what courses you were offering, how many graduate students you
were supervising, and whether you had charge of a seminar or
special studies. So it did not produce blanket recognition with
augmentation of titles for everyone. A few in the department
never were offered academic title, within senate professorial
series, because they didn't ever really engage in the teaching
program.
But adding graduate students to our portfolio of activities
was a fairly significant event, as far as the department was
concerned. It changed the attitude and the focus of the
research. You couldn't assign a graduate student a problem of
improving the varietal performance of citrus. You had to give
them some kind of a research program that had an opportunity to
come to fruition and conclusion within a reasonable length of
time — a year, year and a half, or two. So the nature of the
studies necessarily became more fundamental, more circumscribed.
It also forced those of us who became involved in formal course
teaching to think beyond our own immediate problem area — in my
case, the vegetable diseases. I had to think in terms of a
generalized program of pathogenesis and epidemiology and the
effects of disease development. I was teaching an advanced
course in plant pathology, one that was designed to cap off the
training of the students, so that when they were ready to go into
the field and start operating on their own. they had some
familiarity, or at least they could remember having discussed how
you approach these mysterious things you see in the field, and
what sort of things you begin to unravel and study.
So the beginning of the graduate program was important for
the direction and the emphasis of the department and the people
in it. We had kind of a ready-made market for entering students
because the international reputation that our citrus pathologists
had accumulated over the years brought to Riverside students of
colleagues in Japan, South Africa, South America, Italy, Spain,
and all of the citrus- grow ing areas of the world. Israel was
another country with which we collaborated.
Lage: That must have changed the nature of things at Riverside, too.
115
Kendrick: Oh, it certainly did. We had a heavy emphasis on foreign
students. That kind of internationalized our outlook. It really
was a delightful exposure for me during the five years that I was
a department chair. I tried to take a note from my father's way
of handling graduate students and tried to create opportunities
to make them feel more at home. So it wasn't just a formal
teaching experience in which there was a gulf between the faculty
and the students.
I probably came to this conclusion with more emphasis
because my experience at Cambridge during my sabbatical leave in
'61 and '62 was so fresh in my mind. It was so apparent that the
graduate students at the Cambridge University did not have a
close, friendly relationship with the supervisors of their
research. It was kind of a formal and stiff relationship, in
spite of the fact that the professor or the senior lecturer would
have a Sunday tea once in a while for the students and think that
that was discharging their social duties to them. Socializing
was more important than I thought in general from another
standpoint, using my own experience at Wisconsin. As I described
J. C. Walker, he was kind of a tough, gruff fellow at work, but
he was very personable on a social basis. His graduate students
gathered at his home, with Mrs. Walker, rather regularly for
social events. And we got to see him in a different light than
the teacher-student relationship.
Well, not to belabor the point, I attempted to bring that
kind of camaraderie and social experience to these students in
plant pathology. And I think it worked out pretty well. We
entertained in our home regularly a number of times. We would
try to have departmental events, picnics and the like. The
barrier between teacher and student was at least lowered, to a
considerable extent.
I guess that's about where I'm going to leave it. One of
the lasting things that I'm pleased to note is still hanging on
at Riverside is that the department still holds the
Conversazione. This is an event which is more than a seminar.
It is an event in which the faculty and the students would gather
on a regular basis during the academic year and listen to a
speaker on a topic, on which they could develop some
conversation. In trying to design an attractive way to describe
it, I came up with the notion that it ought to be called the
Conversaz ior.e, Italian spelling.
It got institutionalized, and we held them regularly enough
so that it really worked out pretty well, with an informal
evening meeting for an hour or two, where the students really
felt that they could come in and meet the faculty in a friendly
informal atmosphere. We usually served coffee and donuts or
sweet rolls as refreshments.
116
Lage: And this was just graduate students, or would it include
undergraduates?
Kendrick: We really didn't have any undergraduates. We had a graduate
program, but we didn't have any undergraduate teaching. Plant
pathology offers in some institutions an undergraduate degree,
but it doesn't really lend itself to an undergraduate degree
because you have to get so much background, so much biology
first. By the time you get all of the botany, the chemistry and
the microbiology and all you really need before you begin to
study abnormal botany, you've finished your four years. So
there's not a lot of room left in an undergraduate curriculum to
put enough plant pathology into it to get a degree in plant
pathology. So we didn't pursue the undergraduate degree;
fundamentally it's a graduate program.
I notice once in a while when I see the meeting schedule for
the Department of Plant Pathology at Riverside that they're still
meeting for the Cor.versaz ione.
Lage: That's a nice legacy.
Kendrick: They probably don't know who introduced the idea.
Lage: How did you happen to pick that name? Where did the Italian
name come in?
Kendrick: Cambridge. They had a Conversaz ione. I don't know why they have
an Italian name, but it was one of the things I brought back from
there, and I thought it would be a good idea to try it at Riverside.
Let me say one more thing about the three departments of
plant pathology in the University of California. We had a
practice that started with my father, John Middleton and Dr.
Gardner at Berkeley, of holding a statewide plant pathology
conference once a year. That was motivated by a desire of the
members of the three departments to become better acquainted w ith
each other, and it was constructed around sessions in which we
would talk about subjects of interest to the whole group. Since
this was prior to the time when we at Riverside were engaged in
teaching, the teaching subjects were not sessions that we would
participate in, but there would be sessions that were research-
oriented or policy- orientated, or dealing with budget problems or
personnel evaluation techniques and policies.
But the major emphasis was to get better acquainted with one
another. That continued quite productively. I think it's fallen
off a little bit nowadays; I don't think they meet more than
about once every two years, and the attendance tends not to be as
good as it was in those early years. But during the years that I
had anything to do with it, we had pretty good attendance.
117
Kendrick: We created a small executive group with the three department
chairs and a representative from each of the three departments.
This executive committee of six people handled things of common
interest and need without needing to call everybody together for
a meeting. So it was an attempt by us, as departments, to
collaborate and not pursue things that got in one another's way.
I think it worked out to our advantage — that was a
nonadministratively stimulated effort, although the
administration at the time certainly didn't discourage us from
getting together. The entomology department at Berkeley and
Riverside and Davis also did the same thing, in a little
different way.
118
VI THE KENDRICKS' COMWNITY ACTIVITIES IN RIVERSIDE
Active in the Presbyterian Church
Kendrick: Let's get on to some of the community activities.
Lage: How large a community was Riverside?
Kendrick: Well, in 1947 when we arrived in town, the city had a population
of about 35,000 people. The city boundaries suggested a city
larger than that, but there was a lot of agriculture inside the
city limits. It was a long narrow city; distance from the north
boundary to the southern boundary was nearly eight or ten miles.
It bordered the Santa Ana River, which is underground most of the
time, except in flood stages. It's a river that's been sanded up
through the years of flooding and floodplain activity. The
channel is perfectly obvious, and it's a fairly wide channel. So
the city of Riverside was built on the side of the river.
The community was relatively small, although it was much
larger than Davis, which was a very small community, not
exceeding about 1,500 people in those early days when I was
associated with it. So Riverside was a fairly good-sized
metropolis when we moved there in 1947. Of course, now it's
much, much bigger.
The community activities began for us primarily with our
association with Calvary Presbyterian Church. When Evelyn and I
moved to Riverside, we had a difficult time finding a place to
live. We first lived in a room in the home of the mother of one
of the subsequent faculty members of Riverside, Mrs. Bingham.
That gave us a couple of months to look around, and we found a
two-bedroom duplex in the western part of town about five miles
from the Citrus Experiment Station. It was very comfortable.
The other part of it was occupied by Lillian and Bud Bartlett.
Bud was a member of the entomology department in the Citrus
Experiment Station so we shared our transportation to work with
each other.
119
Kendrick: Then we decided that we would take the plunge and build our own
home in 1950. We moved to the eastern part of the city, near the
city limits. Our property was near the west border of the Citrus
Experiment Station on a street called Prince Albert Drive.
That's where we were when we moved to Berkeley in 1968.
But our beginning association with the city of Riverside
itself began with our contacts and our attendance at Calvary
Presbyterian Church, which was a large downtown church, next to
the community hospital. It was an urban church and had a
congregation of a large size. Its congregation was made up of a
pretty good cross-section of Riverside's professional people,
business persons, doctors, lawyers, bankers, municipal judges,
county judges, municipal and county school officials. We got
invited by someone to a group called Mariners, which was a group
for young couples. That is where we found the various
professional and business people.
One of the leaders of that group at that time was the
secretary of the Riverside Chamber of Commerce, a fellow named
Chuck [Charles B.] O'Neill. Chuck O'Neill was, like a lot of the
executive managers of chambers of commerce, a very outgoing
person, very easy to know and quite friendly. And of course he
made us feel at home instantly. It's interesting to note that he
was a vigorous member of the Citizens' University Committee that
was quite active in the early fifties in trying to persuade the
Regents to establish the College of Letters and Science at
Riverside. So he had more than a casual interest in people who
were from the Citrus Experiment Station.
And subsequently, Chuck O'Neill was employed by the
experiment station to be their business manager.
Lage: Town and gown coming together.
Kendrick: Town and gown was really coming together quite well. That
experience of becoming acquainted with a cross—section of
Riverside very early in our stay introduced us to a number of
people whom we became friendly with in a social way and led us to
spend our leisure time with the citizens of Riverside, rather
than socializing with colleagues whom I was with most of the day.
I'd have to say that is not the usual way in which the academic
community relates to one another. They tend to isolate
themselves among themselves and not mix into the community.
Well, it wasn't too long, without campaigning for it, that
Evelyn and I wound up as the chief Mariners. Mariners, I think,
is a Presbyterian term used to describe the group for young
married couples.
120
Kendrick: You'll also notice how I said it was a group for young married
couples, which really describes the times of the late forties and
fifties. It was assumed that most young couples were married,
not the kind of mixed family relationships which are so common
today.
But as I had started to say, Evelyn and I found ourselves
captains of the Mariners — I forget what title they called their
leadership, but — within short order, we were the leaders of that
group. And of course, that gives you a great opportunity to know
everybody, work with them, and find out what they do and what
they're interested in. So we quickly became well-known in the
group, as well as making a lot of friends among a wide array of
Riverside citizens.
I became fairly active in the choir. I liked choral wcrk,
and during most of the years I was in Riverside, I sang in the
choir. That placed me with another group of people, and I got a
little better acquainted with the inner workings of a large
church. This church, as I recall, must have had twelve or
fifteen hundred members. It was not small.
I progressed through the various activity groups of the
church, becoming a deacon and then an elder. I participated in a
building committee program, and we built the main sanctuary, a
gothic concrete structure during the time we were there. I
served on a search committee for the senior minister who presided
for the significant time that we were in Riverside. The senior
minister of the church when we joined was Denton Jerow. Denton,
incidentally, became a neighbor of ours on Prince Albert Drive
when he retired and built a home just across the street from us;
we were well-acquainted with him. The minister whom we searched
for when Denton decided to retire was T. Franklyn Hudson, who was
the minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland before
he came to Riverside and spent nearly twenty years as the senior
minister of the Calvary Presbyterian Church.
The three choir directors for whom I sang and became well
acquainted with were Helge Pearson, Roberta Bitgood and Jack
Schneider, and each one of those added considerably to my musical
education.
All of this early exposure led to other kinds of activities.
Evelyn became fairly active, in spite of the fact that we had two
young adopted children at the time, in Children's League of
Riverside. That organization was associated with the community
hospital, Riverside Community Hospital. The primary purpose of
Children's League was to furnish the children's wing of the
hospital with amenities to make a hospital stay for children more
enjoyable and less of a harrowing experience. There were opportu
nities for social activities for young children, and their mothers.
121
Kendrick: We adopted Janet, our daughter, in December of 1949. Her
birthdate is October 15, 1949. We adopted her brother, Douglas,
in June of 1952, and his birthdate is March 10, 1952. So by
1952, when a lot of these activities that I'm describing were
bubbling along, we had these two- and less than one-year-olds to
take care of, plus a new home on Prince Albert Drive. We were
really quite busy and active and happy. It was a good time of
our lives, to be thoroughly incorporated in the Riverside city,
its life, and activities. I was busy with my work at the
experiment station.
Town and Gown Tensions; Explaining the University to the
Community
Kendrick: We weren't ignoring our university activities; there was the
active group called Campus CLub, which I have described earlier
and in which Evelyn was active. The Campus CLub was important in
the lives of members of the Citrus Experiment Station because
through their hospitality committee, Christmas parties, and
summer picnics the club fostered the family nature of our
relatively small group of University people.
Well, Campus Club and the Citizens' University Committee
were both seeking ways to make the development of the College of
Letters and Science at Riverside a happy experience. An
outgrowth of those groups, which didn't replace either one, was
Town and Gown. We had a Town and Gown organization to develop,
and that was also a fun experience. The only difficulty was that
there was a lot of eagerness from the town people to become a
part of it but not very much participation from the new college
faculty. There was pretty good participation by the experiment
station people, but I would say there was meager attendance at
Town and Gown events by the college faculty.
Lage: As you've described the new faculty in earlier interviews, I can
see they might not enter eagerly into the community.
Kendrick: Well, they were young, and they were oriented towards their own
academic development and career. I have to say that I think
there was a little bit of academic snobbery; they felt they were
a little bit above those town people who were working for a
living. [laughs]
Lage: Perhaps they came from a more urban setting —
Kendrick: Well, it was not only that. I think there was an incompatability
in conversations. It was easy to get angry discourses going
between someone who felt that they wanted to socialize the city,
122
Kendrick: wanted to bay the municipal power supply, buy out Southern
California Edison and turn over the utilities to a municipally-
owned organization. I mention that because it became quite an
issue in the city. One of the early problems that Provost
Watkins and his administrative colleagues had was to calm down
some city fathers about what kind of radicalized faculty they
were assembling on the Riverside campus, who seemed to want to
bring communism and socialism to this quiet community, which had
been getting along very comfortably all these years.
Lage: But at least that does show some interest in community affairs,
if the faculty was interested —
Kendrick: Well, there were several activists in the sociology department,
but that's their profession. They search around for these
opportunities to try and change [laughing] the structures. I
always chuckled a bit about this because of all the eagerness
that communities show, usually making a lot of effort to get a
university or a college campus established in their community
without realizing the full impact of living with a university as
a neighbor. Once it's there, it's often an uncomfortable
relationship because it is the nature of the faculties to be a
bit disrespectful of traditional institutions. They are a free-
thinking collection of people; like Judge Bork* in his writings,
he's provocative and he challenges. Faculties, if they're any
good, are provocative. They're not necessarily comfortable with
the status quo unless it involves their own welfare, in which
case they're well entrenched and defend that status vigorously.
They don't want any monkeying around with those kinds of changes
for themselves. But as far as somebody else's situation is
concerned, or a city government or what-have-you, they (some few
activists) want to get in and change things so that in their
minds everybody gets treated fair and equal.
Lage: Did you find yourself in a role of mediator, or someone who
explained the —
Kendrick: I found myself in a role of defender of the University, but not
in the sense that I defended everything it did. What I was
trying to do was explain what the University was, and that they
should be glad that they had the academic experience introduced
into their midst. I was a person who felt that not everything
that we did in the name of the University or the name of the
faculty was necessarily correct or right, but I spent a lot of
time trying to broaden the perspective of my colleagues in the
* The congressional hearings on the nomination of Robert Bork to
the IKS. Supreme Court were taking place at the time of this
interview.
123
Kendrick: community and suggest to them that the members of the faculty had
every right to express their individual opinions. And that that
was -i valuable freedom which the citizens ought to cherish.
A lot of my business and agricultural friends had pretty
conservative Republican attitudes. It was sort of a "Yes, sir,
no, sir," attitude about things, and law and order was at the top
of their list of priorities. Obedience and subservience to
authority were sort of the order of the day, and you did what the
boss told you to do.
Those attitudes are not held in very high regard by a
faculty. I spent a good deal of my time both socially and in
other arenas trying to interpret what the faculty was and why it
was important and proper for them to be questioning traditional
policies as well as traditional activities.
Lage: This must have given you great experience for your later work as
vice president.
Kendrick: Well, I think it did. I felt rather strongly at Riverside that
the University was being maligned unnecessarily and that the
University was more than a football team and a basketball team.
The Town and Gown did a lot to help in that regard; we had a lot
of very fun social events. It was not an organization where we
attempted to hold erudite discussions and meetings, but it was an
organization which had social events at least twice a year,
always well attended. The climate of Riverside was such that
fall gatherings could be held outside in one of the town member's
large yard. They were looked forward to, particularly by the
town people, and I always felt it was too bad that more of my
college faculty colleagues didn't attend so that they could
engage in informal discourse and arguments. I thought they'd be
better understood if they would just explain themselves.
I had a colleague in biochemistry, who tended to be a real
nonconformist as far as the traditional policies and values in
society were concerned — that is, traditional as far as Riverside
was concerned. I used to remind him that he lived in a community
of people who were not all working at the University, and I said,
"If we could just get the faculty to explain to their neighbors
why they think what they do is important to them, and begin to
try and translate what it is that makes the University tick, I
think we'd be much better understood. Have you ever tried to
explain to your neighbor why it's important to study the
translocation of 2,4-D ions across a membrane in a plant? Trying
to explain, in your neighbor's terms, what it is that drives you
to have an interest in that kind of investigation?"
124
Kendrick: Well, that's only illustrative of the kinds of things that I
think faculty are not good at. They don't explain why
professional interests drive them with such dedication into these
studies. I think they sell short the ability of non-academic
people to comprehend those sorts of things if they just explain
to them. Riverside was not unique in having some strained
relationships with individual members of the faculty, but there
was a general acceptance of the University as a whole, and
Provost Watkins was such a lovable person that he could calm
almost any apprehension that would arise.
Free Speech Days at Riverside
Kendrick: You can imagine that when the free speech activities came along,
in the early and mid-sixties, the events that were happening at
Berkeley at that time were not solely confined to Berkeley. The
other campuses began to stir, too.
[laughs] I recall a request from the Young Communist League
to hold a meeting on the University campus. I don't recall
specifically when it was, but I would guess it was in the mid-
sixties — '64, '65 — right about the time that Clark Kerr was
having all kinds of trouble convincing the Regents that denial of
free speech was going to cause more problems than acquiesing and
at least trying to control it.
Well, the event that was proposed at Riverside was a
particularly controversial event. There was a lot of strong
feeling about staging this communist speaker to talk about
whatever was on his mind at the time. I think I was in the
Kiwanis CLub then. (I joined Kiwanis with some degree of
reluctance in 1962. I had been approached to join Kiwanis Club
much earlier than that by one of my closest friends in the
department, Dr. Merrill Wallace, who had been a member of Kiwanis
Club for all the years that he was in the department. He was
another one of these who moved easily in the community. I kind
of followed Merrill's lead, because I regarded his activities and
advice rather importantly.)
I recall spending a lot of time trying to explain to ay
Kiwanis friends that scheduling a communist talk on the campus
was not necessarily a bad thing, that it could lead to an
exposure of the fallacies of communism a lot easier than trying
to suppress them and keeping them in the dark. I said, "Don't
overlook the fact that we have a lot of refugees from communist
countries around here, and they're just dying to undress this
person. "
125
Kendrick: Well, the event was ultimately scheduled over loud protests from
every quarter, and that's precisely what happened. We had a
member in our department who was a combination laboratory
technician-graduate student, who had escaped communist domination
in World War II.
Lage: From what country?
Kendrick: Yugoslavia. He had been captured in World War II and forced to
serve in the Russian Army. He was the most violent anti-
communist person I ever saw, and I think he even joined the John
Birch Society. I said, "Well, I can understand John being a
member of the John Birch Society because he had had
excruciatingly difficult experiences with communists and
communist domination."
One thing I found out was that those refugees from the
communist countries came out of the woodwork at that meeting, and
they really laced into this person who was expounding the virtues
of communism and the communist way of life. It was a real eye-
opener, I thought, to the value of free speech, which a lot of
people had feared would result in a pied piper reaction. So to
my Kiwanis colleagues I said, "You sell the academic community
short if you think they're a bunch of pied piper mice and
children. They don't follow just because somebody says 'Come on
and I'll lead you.' Their life is spent questioning established
dogma, and if they're any good as faculty members, they'll study
the issue very carefully before they arrive at any particular
commitment. "
Membership in Community Organizations
Kendrick: Well, backing up a little bit, Evelyn's activities in Children's
League and Tick-Tockers (a mothers and daughters organization for
community service) led to her being asked to join the Junior Aid,
a young women's group composed of wives and single women
associated with the active social structure of the community.
Membership was coveted by many of the young ladies because of its
social status. That was not true of Evelyn, -however. That
organization later became affiliated with the national Junior
League group and changed its name to the Junior League of
Riverside. It is an organization which raises money for good
causes. You'll recall I earlier said that it was in one of these
Junior-Aid-sponsored follies, a fundraiser, that the quartet I
was a part of appeared.
126
Kendrick: Well, that led to further exposure to a little broader-based
collection of Riverside people and citizens, and placed us cr.ce
again in another social structure of the town. It broadened our
acquaintances even further.
As I had mentioned earlier, I had finally yielded to the
pressure to join Kiwanis dub in 1962. I had resisted doing it
because of their attendance requirement. I was out of town a
good deal with my professional activities, and I felt that I
wasn't going to be able to maintain their attendance requirements
easily. But because I had so many friends, both through the
church and through the Victoria Country Club, which we joined
primarily for golf and swimming, in the late fifties I gave in
and joined them in Kiwanis membership.
My closest friend, Sheldon Pouley, now deceased, who was a
businessman in Riverside, and Cub Callis, who lived across the
street from us and worked for the school system, said to ce one
day, "You don't have to do anything if you join the Kiwanis Club.
Just attend the luncheons." I mistakenly believed him. Within
about a month, I was introducing the speaker, and another month I
was the song leader, aided by Homer Chapman, who was the pianist
for our quartet, as well as for Kiwanis. He was also a long-time
Kiwanian, another person who mixed well in town, and a member of
the Calvary Presbyterian Church. He was chairman of the soils
department and was Dan Aldrich's chair at the time Dan Aldrich
was in the department.
It seemed that my notoriety as a quartet member dictated
that I should become the song leader at Kiwanis, so with Homer at
the piano, I felt that would be easy to do; Homer could cover up
almost any mistake that a person made because he was such a good
pianist. Anyway, within about six weeks, following the advice
that I didn't have to do anything in Kiwanis, I found myself more
than just a little active in the club. That led to a broader
exposure of acquaintanceship; we had the usual events that
Kiwanis (Hubs have. I ultimately found myself on the board of
directors for the club, and at the time I had to resign and move
to Berkeley as the vice president, I was the first vice president
of the club, slated to move into the presidency in the following
year. So 1968 extracted me from that particular commitment,
which I had been looking forward to.
When I moved to Berkeley, I checked in with the Kiwanis dub
at Berkeley and went to one meeting and found that it was not
anything like the club I had left. It was the last time I've had
any affiliation with any service club.
127
Evelyn's School Board Service
Kendrick: Back to Riverside. In 1964, there was a vacancy that occurred on
the Riverside City School Board. On our street, Prince Albert
Drive, there was a good representation from the school system of
Riverside. Bill Noble, president of the Riverside City Community
College lived two doors from us, and a little further down the
street lived Bruce Miller, who was the superintendent of the city
schools. Cub Callis, in charge of construction for the school
system, lived across the street from us. I have already
mentioned that Denton Jerow, the retired minister of Calvary
Presbyterian Church, lived across the street from us. A long
time acquaintance, Robert Metcalf, who was chairman of the
Department of Entomology at this time, was a next-door neighbor.
Bob is now at the University of Illinois and is about ready to
retire. He was the golfer who got me into playing golf.
Jim Pitts, who was a professor of chemistry and at that time
the chairman of the Department of Chemistry, also lived on our
street. The section of Prince Albert Drive where we lived was a
dead-end street, so it was a self-contained neighborhood. It was
a street where the people had a strong feeling of community;
everybody on the street would participate in Fourth of July
events, when we would close off the street and have a street
party. Contrary to the kind of busy, involved urban living that
some people endure, this was not the case on that street.
Everybody was well acquainted with everybody else.
In 1964, when a vacancy on the Riverside City School Board
occurred, Evelyn was asked to fill that vacancy. We were both
surprised and flattered by the request. Evelyn was a little
hesitant to accept, but I could see that she was interested in
serving on the board. I said, "That's a good idea." So she
accepted the invitation and began to serve as a member of the
five-person Riverside City School Board. Thus began another
exposure to a broader aspect of community activities.
She served with much dedication and gave a lot of time to
her board duties. Our children were old enough to not need close
attention. They were still in school and somewhat embarrassed by
having their mother on the city school board.
When her term expired in 1966, she was then required to run
for election, which was a new experience for us, and one that she
was not really thrilled about, but she did decide to stand for
election, nevertheless. She ran with the very popular president
of the board, whose name is Art Littleworth. Art is a lawyer
with the firm Best, Best, and Kreiger, a leading law firm in
Riverside.
128
Kendrick: Arthur Littlew or th was a very compassionate, competent, and
intelligent leader of that board. It was about 1965 when a de
facto segregated school in Riverside was burned. It was never
proven that it was caused by arson, but most people were rather
certain that it was. That brought to immediate attention
Riverside's problem with segregation. There were two kinds of
segregation of schools in Riverside: one was Hispanic, or
Mexican, and the other was black. These schools were not
constructed to be segregated, but because they were built in
neighborhoods that became dominated by either Hispanic or Mexican
residents, on the one hand, or black, on the other, they became
de facto segregated schools. It was the black school that got
burned.
Lage: And this was the time of the Watts riot, wasn't it?
Kendrick: It was about the time of the Watts riots, yes. The school that
got burned was the one that our youngsters went to. Then the
question became, what to do? We could rebuild the school as it
was and go on as if nothing had taken place, or try to do
something about the segregation. This board, with its leadership
and the school administration, really moved out ahead of most of
California at that time and designed a one-way busing system to
move the students into a more integrated school experience. I
must admit that it was not all spontaneous on the part of the
school board; they had a lot of noisy sessions in which the black
community was saying, "You're not going to force us back into
this situation again." So there was a lot of acrimony.
Wilson Riles at the time was a member of the State
Department of Education, and he came down and helped counsel the
board in how to handle this problem. The one-way busing system
was designed to disperse the minorities into the previously
white-dominated schools, and the school system and the board
members spent an entire summer counseling with the parents of the
youngsters in those receiving schools, preparing them for this
event. It was a tremendous effort. When it came time to get the
busing underway, it went just as smoothly as it could, with no
adverse events that we were aware of.
Lage: Did this solve the problem of the Hispanic schools?
Kendrick: I was going to come to that. The Mexicans did not really want to
be dispersed. They were the least enthusiastic about losing
their sense of community. The two areas where these schools were
segregated were not close to one another. The Hispanic Mexicans
lived in an area called Casa Blanca. While it was not an area
that was very affluent, it had a lot of amenities that they were
proud of. It did have a feeling of community. I think there was
some sympathy in trying to preserve that sense of community, but
129
Kendrick: of course the commitment to desegregate the segregated schools
was pretty strong, and to the extent that they could, they bused
them into a more integrated situation.
That was a very indelible experience as far as the board
members and those of us who were living with that situation were
concerned. Riverside got a lot of publicity over it, and I think
it was a feather in their caps to be able to say that they faced
up to an issue and really tried to do something about it.
Well, Evelyn was re-elected. It was not a very close
election. And she was embarked upon her first fully elected
four-year term and really enjoying it quite thoroughly. One year
she and a school board colleague found themselves active in the
United Fund drive; they co-chaired the residential campaign.
That was just another example of the kind of community
involvement that we've engaged in.
An Unexpected Job Offer from President Hitch
Kendrick: Then came the rather unexpected invitation to me to meet with
President [Charles] Hitch and Harry Wellman one afternoon
following a meeting of this Capital Outlay Review Board [CORE] —
one of the systemwide administrative committees on which I served
by virtue of my vice chairmanship of the Academic Council and
Assembly. The board was chaired by Harry Wellman.
That meeting, I think, occurred sometime in late February or
early March. President Hitch asked me if I would consider
joining his staff as the vice president, agricultural sciences.
Lage: This actual invitation was not something you were prepared for?
Kendrick: No. I didn't have any idea why he wanted to meet with me. My
mind was on, as I think I've said earlier, what was going to
happen to the College of Agricultural Science at Riverside.
Knowing that Boyce was going to retire July 1, and in February
his successor had not been designated, my focus was on that
position, because I was a department chair with five years'
experience and a lot of activity on the campus. I really was
concerned about who might be the next leader, and was fully
prepared to say, "Yes, I'll do it," if somebody wanted to ask me.
In those days extreme search committees were not used, and
they didn't advertise for applicants all over the United States.
Faculty advisory committees were used to advise the
administration when they were trying to identify candidates.
That was pretty standard. But there was not a lot of
130
Kendrick: advertising. Candidates generally didn't apply for positions.
These search and advise committees functioned confidentially and
quietly assembled a list of potential candidates, made
evaluations, after looking at the curriculum vitaes, and all
pertinent information they could gather about each candidate.
Ultimately, the committee would come to some conclusions and
report to whomever appointed them in the first place. I
participated on several of those myself, such as for the vice
chancellor for Riverside and others. They are very helpful
committees as far as administration is concerned because they do
the work for you. They screen and rank the candidates. I
presume Hitch and Wellman used one of these committees, but I had
no idea that I was on their list of candidates or even being
considered for that position.
What Harry Wellman said to me at the 00 RB meeting was,
"Charlie Hitch would like to meet with you about four o'clock
this afternoon." We were meeting here in Berkeley. This was in
one of these periods when I was all over the state nearly every
week. The CORB plan of meetings in the winter and early spring
was to go to every campus and listen to the campus present their
capital needs for the next budget.
Well, when Harry said, "President Hitch would like to meet
you at four o'clock," I thought, "Oh no, what have I done now?"
[laughter] Hitch had been appointed president in January of
1968. The previous year Harry Wellman had been acting president
after dark Kerr had been relieved of his presidency the previous
January in 1967. That was the period when I was fairly active in
the Academic Council and on the statewide budget committee.
Receiving this invitation to join President Hitch's
administration at that time kind of hit me right between the
eyes, and I said, "Well, I'd better think about it." It sounded
terrific at the time; I was so surprised that I had to reflect
upon it. And of course it meant a major change was being
proposed in our lives, because we were thoroughly involved in
our Riverside connections, and I felt badly that it would disrupt
Evelyn's activities. She was just nicely launched in the
official activities of the school board and a recognized citizen
in the community.
But that will be the next story. It's obvious that I
decided to accept and moved into that vice presidency the first
of April of 1968.
Lage : It's interesting that with this method of selection, there's no
interview process.
Kendrick: There wasn't any interview —
131
Lage: To see what your view of matters were, and what direction you
wanted to take it in —
Kendrick: You're right. I often reflected and wondered a little bit about
that. That's certainly not the way you go about appointing
people now. Now you bring in your final candidates for
interviews, and let them make their own case. But I've often
wondered if Charlie Hitch had any real thoughts about where he
wanted the agricultural program to go, or if he had any
particular thing that he wanted accomplished. I think he knew
that it was a fairly large and significant internal organization,
but he had Harry Wellman to advise him about the agricultural
needs and how to put its administration together.
He had also at that time identified whom he wanted as his
successor to Harry Wellman as the vice president, and that was
Jack Oswald. Jack Oswald at that time was president of the
University of Kentucky. Jack, as I related in an earlier
interview, was one of my father's early graduate students, and
another plant pathologist. The two of us had had a close, almost
family, relationship. So as far as Charlie Hitch was concerned,
by bringing to a very top-level administrative position somebody
who understood agriculture, he didn't really have to pay personal
attention to that area of his responsibility. All he needed was
somebody down at the operational level who came from agriculture
and, I guess, who was not controversial. I think at that point,
I was pretty noncontroversial because nobody knew what position I
would take on agricultural issues.
Lage: Even yourself?
Kendrick: I hadn't even thought about it. I described for President Hitch
what I was trying to do with the department at Riverside to
broaden its outlook on its immediate problems, to introduce a
capacity to pursue the basic aspects of research that were
related to the department, and to pay attention to its mission.
But I really hadn't given much thought to where I felt the
University's total agricultural program ought to be headed.
There was a little discussion about that in the interview
[laughs], and I suppose if I had been a complete bust in terms of
not being very articulate, completely devoid of ideas, that he
could have backed off without saying, "Well, I think you're the
one we'd like to have run this program." But I have reflected a
little bit on my experience with CORE and some discussions with
Harry Wellman —
Lage: Recently?
132
Kendrick: No, not recently, but in trying to figure out "why me?" I'm
really kind of ahead of my Riverside experience here, but not too
much — I wanted to mention that in addition to the Kiwanis dub.
the church, the Victoria dub, that I was trying to be a good
father for my son. I was active in the YMCA and the Indian Guide
Program, which was a father-son program, in Little League
baseball, in trout fishing, and other activities —
Lage : I don't know how you did it all, frankly.
Kendrick: — that fathers and mothers try to participate in with their
children. Well, you do it because you're young. You don't run
out of energy. When I look back on it now, I just don't have the
energy to put into that sort of thing anymore. But it actually
was a fun time of our lives. We were totally engaged in useful
community associations as well as in a lot of fun social events
and a very satisfying professional career.
Now, to finish the thought that I had on my reflections on
some conversations with Harry Wellman. Most of us thought that
the obvious candidate to succeed Maurice Peterson as the
University dean of agriculture was the dean at Davis, James
Meyer. We didn't quite understand why things dragged on so long
and why his appointment was held up.
One time during a lunch hour, Harry and I were walking
somewhere, and he asked me where I thought the headquarters of
the division ought to be located. Then Harry went on and said,
"Do you think it could function effectively at Davis?" I said,
"Well, I suppose it could function — " I recall very vividly my
response. I said, "I expect it could function effectively almost
anywhere you put it, and certainly could operate well from
Davis. "
I said, "I think there is one problem with locating it at
Davis, and that is that Riverside will feel that they always are
going to get what's left over. That may not be the case, but the
appearance and the perception is going to be there. They have
struggled mightily to try and get out from under the notion that
Riverside is sort of second-best and it would like to be
recognized on its own without comparisons. If the headquarters
for the division were at Davis, there is just no way to avoid the
fact that it will appear to be disadv ant aged. At least where the
division's office is now, in the President's Office, Riverside
feels it has equal standing with Berkeley and Davis when its
needs are being considered." And, of course, it was well known
that Al Boyce as the director of the Citrus Experiment Station,
and the dean of the college, was very persuasive and successful
in presenting his case for resources, often outbidding the other
two campuses for support of a program, a position, or a building.
133
Kendrick: And then that was the end of the conversation. Harry didn't say,
"I think you' re right." He was j ust f ishir.g. And I, in
reflection, think the position of vice president was offered to
Jim Meyer, who, true to his conviction to this day, felt that the
headquarters for the division ought to be on the Davis campus,
and made that a condition of his acceptance of the appointment.
Lage: But you don't know that for a fact?
Kendrick: I've never talked to Jim about this, and I'm just speculating
about that matter. Jim was never very reluctant to express his
views that the Davis campus ought to house the headquarters of
the division. And as a matter of fact, at the tail end of my
activity, we had planned to move parts of the University's
division administration to the Davis campus, with support from
President David Gardner. We'd better not get into that today.
Lage: Harry Wellman apparently didn't want the division to move to
Davis?
Kendrick: No. Harry did not want to headquarter it at Davis. And for what
reason I don't know — maybe the same reason that I have indicated.
I think it's a persuasive reason, and I have always felt that the
division's leadership, top leadership, needed to be a part of the
President's Office as long as there was a committment to have it
led by a vice president.
#1
On the other hand, Claude Hutchison, the longtime dean of
agriculture, specifically set out to make Davis the headquarters
for the agriculture program of the University. They went so far
as to design the headquarters building for the university dean on
the Davis campus. The buildings never got built, but all of the
plans were in motion for it. I think I've read some of the
history that points that out. There are a lot of long memories
in Davis, and they have felt they were promised that
agriculture's management and leadership would be on that campus,
and that it was blocked or stopped for various reasons. Fart of
it was financial, part of it was political, and part was
intrigue, I'm sure.
But nevertheless, there was a change in plans, and it's
always been a source of tension between the systemwide
administration of the agricultural program and the Davis campus
administration. And there has been an interesting tension also
in Riverside, as people loyal to that campus strongly advise and
work diligently to be sure that the headquarters does not move to
the Davis campus.
Lage: Where does the Berkeley campus fit into all of this?
13A
Kendrick: Berkeley tends to support the view that the headquarters ought to
be in University Hall, but they don't feel nearly as threatened
by it. I think it's because the agricultural program or. the
Berkeley campus is a relatively small part of the total campus
program. At Riverside, it's a significant part of the total
activity, and if they were to somehow lose their resources, or
have them cut back, or not have any sympathy towards their needs,
they'd be in real trouble.
135
VII THE FINAL YEARS AT RIVERSIDE
Representing the University-Wide Faculty during Years of
Turbulence
[Date of Interview: October 6. 1987] ##
Kendrick: I want to talk further about that last year or two in Riverside
to explain why I didn't arrive in the systemwide administration
with any fixed agenda. In reviewing the record, I find that my
statewide senate responsibilities were a little more extensive
than I earlier had indicated. In '66 — '67, I was a member of the
Academic Council. And then in '67-'68, I was the vice chairman
of the council, expecting during '68- '69 that I would chair the
council and assume all the responsibilities that the systemwide
senate chairman had with the President's Office and his
administration. The duties were often divided between the chair
and the vice chairman in such a way that they kept both of us
busy, but not necessarily by simultaneously attending the same
meetings except for meetings of the Regents, the Academic Council
and the Academic Assembly.
Robley Williams was the chairman of the Academic, Council in
'67-'68. Robley was professor of biochemistry, and a member of
the faculty in the Virus Laboratory here in Berkeley. Both of us
were appointed members on the administration's Budget Review
Committee and the Capital Outlay Review Board. Those bodies were
busy in the late fall and spring because the University was
building the record for the next year's budget requests. The
faculty participated in that process through the appointments of
the chair and the vice chair to those administrative committees.
That experience provided me with a good deal of practical exposure
to just how the University budget was constructed and who made the
decisions concerning it. I quickly found out that Vice President
Wellman was the one who had great influence in the outcome of the
President's decisions. I had known from previous observations
that he was really a very good administrator and quite competent
in sorting out the real needs of the entire University.
136
f*
Lage: I would like you to make a few comments about your experience
with the Board of Regents before we get into the vice presidency.
Kendrick: I was mostly a sideline observer as the vice chairman of the
Academic Council in '67-'68, which was the year following Clark
Kerr's dismissal as president, in January, 1967, soon after
Ronald Reagan took office as governor.
Lage: Harry Wellman was acting president in 1967, and Charles Hitch
came as president in January, 1968.
Kendrick: Yes. Charlie Hitch was at that time vice president for business
and finance. The Regents initiated a search for a successor to
Kerr, which took a while to complete. So during that year Harry
occupied the President's Office, in kind of a dual capacity as
his own vice president as well as the acting president of the
University. He never was given the title of President of the
University, however. The decision to appoint Charlie Hitch
president was made at a meeting of the Regents at UCLA that I
attended.
Lage: Did the Academic Council have any kind of advisory role in the
selection?
Kendrick: They certainly did. Not the council per se, but the faculty did.
There was a specially appointed group of faculty who served on
that selection committee and participated in the review of
candidates. So faculty participation was strong even at that
time. After Vice President Charles Hitch was asked to assume the
presidency on the first of January, 1968, he asked Harry Wellman
to help him as his vice president until he could identify a more
permanent appointment. Harry did, but Harry had officially re
tired by the time, so in a sense he was recalled to active duty.
All of this took place at the same time that there was a
vacancy in the university deanship of agriculture, which was the
period when Harry was the acting president. He wasn't about, I
guess, to make any permanent commitment to the administration of
agriculture until the presidency situation was settled. Which
accounts, as we've said earlier, for why the vacancy just sort of
disappeared from sight — at least in my mind it did. Charlie
quickly assembled a group of vice presidents to support his
administration. I don't know whether initially there were seven
or nine of us; there were quite a few. At one time we had nine
vice presidents. We used to refer to the fact that we had a
baseball team of vice presidents. At another time in my career
we had a basketball team of vice presidents, when we were down to
five. We never had fewer than five vice presidents during my
time in the President's Office.
137
Lage: These changes were made by the various presidents?
Kendrick: The changes occurred with the various presidents, to reflect
their concepts of the kind of vice presidential administration
they wanted.
As I said earlier, Jack Oswald was asked by President Hitch
to return to the University of California as his executive vice
president. Jack's selection as executive vice president, at the
time I was invited to become the vice president for agriculture,
had some persuasive influence in my own decision because I
looked forward to working with him as a part of the President's
Office.
Lage: You went way back with him.
Kendrick: Yes, our relationship went back to about 1940, when he arrived to
enroll in graduate school at Davis. So it was an added
inducement for me to make up my mind to take the vice presidency.
Producing an Academic Plan for Riverside
Kendrick: But before we get into the vice presidency, I want to describe
another activity at Riverside which kept my attention away from
the vacancies in the university-wide administration. What was
happening at Riverside kept my attention focused there because it
was of more immediate concern and had a greater potential impact
on my future role on the Riverside campus.
Within a year or two after Ivan Hinderaker was appointed to
succeed Herman Spieth as chancellor of the Riverside campus, he
appointed a committee to draw up an academic plan for Riverside,
and I was asked to serve on that committee. That committee was
chaired by Professor [Donald] Sawyer, who was a professor of
chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, in the Division of
Physical Sciences. That was an experience that I valued highly
because it complemented the assignment that Chancellor Spieth had
given me earlier in 1959 to design a physical development plan
for the campus which planned to reach a student body size of
5,000 students, without overlooking the fact that in due course
it would go to 10,000 students.
Participating in a committee that was giving attention to
academic planning, which really should have been completed before
discussing a plan for physical development, was an opportunity to
add to my experience. It was also a bonus to me because the
committee membership was drawn mostly from the faculty of the
College of Letters and Science. There were one or two of us from
138
Kendrick: agriculture; we were called aggie faculty. It also gave me an
opportunity to think more deeply and more comprehensively about
undergraduate education. Some of us traveled to other
institutions to look at some innovative programs. I recall going
to Wisconsin with a colleague to look at some University
Extension programs they had back there. We produced what I
thought was really a challenging and good report, but it didn't
cause much more than a ripple on the pond.
Lage: Why was that, do you think?
Kendrick: I wish I knew.
Lage: Did you propose anything that was unusual or — ?
Kendrick: No, but I guess we were too early for our times. What we really
were proposing was some emphasis on general education. And since
undergraduate education is the hot topic today —
Lage: They might go back to that plan.
Kendrick: No, the one thing the faculty does not do well is to go back to
earlier reports. They prefer to look ahead. They think highly
of libraries, but they don't think very highly of past academic
plans. The plans are only valuable as historical records.
Lage: So it was more of a learning experience for you than —
Kendrick: I think the assignment was good for the committee members, but
the plan didn't have much impact on our colleagues who were
expected to implement it. That's a peculiarity of plans, and
it's followed me in all of my experience. Academic plans have a
brief period of influence, and the biggest influence they have is
on the people who develop the plan. If the people who were
engaged in developing the plan wind up with some administrative
responsibility, then the plan may have an impact. But if you're
just producing a plan for somebody else who has the
responsibility for implementation, forget it. I don't think it's
worth the time it takes to put it all together.
Lage: And producing an academic plan was your first charge, you said,
as you came into the vice presidency.
Kendrick: That's right, and I've got some things to say about that because
it proves my point.
139
Value of Shared Governance
Kendrick: Well, that committee was followed soon by another committee that
Chancellor Hinderaker put together to study the reorganization of
the College of Letters and Science. The College of Letters and
Science still consisted of the four major divisions, that was put
together by Provost Watkins and his advisory group. But the
college seemed overly organized for the numbers of students
enrolled at that time, so there needed to be some sort of
amalgamation, and the chancellor instituted the committee to
study the potential amalgamation of the units.
That committee came up with a recommendation that I thought
was brilliant and supported thoroughly. I didn't have any direct
input to the committee because I was not asked to serve on it. I
would willingly have done so, if asked, but I was pretty involved
in university-wide responsibilities then, so it's easy to
understand why these kinds of assignments were passed around as
much as possible. I think I recall that we discussed earlier why
a few of us became so involved in so many things at Riverside.
It was because the campus was small, the faculty was relatively
of a small size, the numbers of senior faculty were even smaller,
but the senate organization and the administrative needs were
just as complicated and the committees were just as numerous as
they were on large campuses where they had a lot of people to
share in those many responsibilities. You would never find
somebody on the Berkeley campus or the UCLA campus being exposed
to as many things as I was on the Riverside campus. The fact
that we didn't have enough people to go around to serve in those
different capacities at Riverside meant that a few of us had to
serve in a lot of different capacities from time to time. And in
the long run, it worked out to my advantage by giving me a
practical education in most aspects of how the University runs,
how it's organized, and how decision-making evolves. It was a
better orientation and practical training ground than I could
have received in any well-organized managerial workshop, that you
might find in a business school or another group responsible for
training administrators.
Lage : Your background touched on every area in this system of shared
governance.
Kendrick: Yes. It also gave me an understanding and appreciation for the
value of the faculty, and the role that the faculty can play in
the shared governance of the administration of the University of
California. I have always held in high regard faculty
participation in these kinds of decisions. The faculty doesn't
make any decisions, but they sure let you know about bum
decisions you might make, or try to persuade you into making
decisions that —
140
Lage: They give a lot of formal advice.
Kendrick: It's advise and consent, just like the U.S. Senate. It's advice
you ignore at your peril. They can make life miserable for you
if you treat them lightly, but there is no reason to do so. You
recognize the faculty prejudices, and if you give them their
chance to contribute, they'll respect you for it, and they'll
understand if you have to make different choices. So I never
felt that I was disadvantaged by taking things to the faculty and
asking their participation in helping me administer the
responsibility that I had.
The College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences:
Cons for Agricultural Research
Pros and
Kendrick: Well, the reorganization committee came up with a scheme to
amalgamate all the science units into one college; all the
science units, that is, except the Department of Psychology,
which was an experimental psychology department rather than a
social psychology group. They didn't want to foresake their
liberal arts origin, I guess.
Lage: They stayed with social sciences?
Kendrick: They stayed with social sciences. But the recommendation, and
ultimately the action, resulted in the formation of the College
of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, which was euphemistically
referred to in kind of an uncomplimentary way as the College of
Nags. The units included in that college were taken both from
the physical sciences and the life sciences. It included the
departments of physics, chemistry, statistics, mathematics,
geology, and since there were no departments in life sciences
such as zoology, bacteriology, microbiology, or botany, it was
incorporated as a Department of Biology.
Lage: Did they departmentalize this later?
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: But that was after your time.
Kendrick: That was after my time. As a matter of fact, they later created
a Department of Plant Sciences and moved all the botanists out of
the biology group into the Department of Plant Sciences, so the
Department of Plant Sciences at Riverside consists of experiment
station horticulturalists, agronomists, pure botanists, plant
physiologists, and the like. It is former Dean W. Mack Bugger's
home department.
141
Kendrick: Well, I'm a little ahead of my story. That amalgamation was to
take place July 1 of 1968. It's easy to understand why my
attention was on what was going to happen at Riverside and how
that was going to affect the Department of Plant Pathology, and
how that might affect Jim Kendrick, and what role I might have in
bringing that recommendation into fruition.
Lage: What effect did the amalgamation eventually have on the
experiment station?
Kendrick: One of the assets of the amalgamation was that it involved the
experiment station members of the College of Agriculture, the
forerunner of the new college, in a viable undergraduate program
for the first time. It brought a lot of attention to
undergraduate education into that unit, because those units which
were formerly in the life and physical sciences had large
undergraduate enrollments, while the departments in the College
of Agricultural Sciences had been largely concerned with graduate
programs.
Well, the viability of the College of Nags — Natural and
Agricultural Sciences — was not threatened, but it certainly had
an effect on its reception by both the agricultural members of
the unit and the external farmer constituency which were
accustomed to being served by the agricultural research group in
the Citrus Experiment Station — which by that time had been
renamed the Citrus Research Center. While this amalgamated
organization was theoretically sound, in my judgment, it didn't
result in very many practical accomplishments as far as
agriculture was concerned, because I'm not aware of very many
undergraduate students coming out of the College of Natural and
Agricultural Sciences with a commitment to a career in the
agricultural sciences.
Lage: You didn't get many students to go on in graduate school under
the agricultural program?
Kendrick: No. There were a few people in agriculture already who did not
have an undergraduate degree, who enrolled and got the Bachelor
of Science degree in that college, but I don't think that we
enticed very many students who had enrolled in that college as
undergraduates to pursue agricultural subjects. Probably that
was because the faculty in the agriculture departments didn't
really participate very much in undergraduate instruction. So it
was not just a lack of student interest; you can attribute some
of the failure to reach undergraduates to the lack of
undergraduate teaching participation by the older, traditional
agricultural faculty, as well as the fact that those faculty
members who came from the College of Letters and Science weren't
about to suggest that their undergraduate students pursue
agricultural subjects. They wanted the good students to go on in
142
Kendrick: their own fields of science. So all in all, the big challenge
was to try and amalgamate into a productive unit two very
different kinds of faculties. It was initially an organizational
marriage of convenience rather than a rich educational
experience.
I thought this reorganized college was going to be first-
class because it contained the elements of the kind of
undergraduate preparation that I had had in Berkeley in the
College of Letters and Science in the magnificent major called
general curriculum. I never felt that I suffered any in my
preparation for my career.
Lage: Your comments remind me a little bit of some of the things Henry
Vaux said about the College of Natural Resources, the formation
of that. He had high hopes that the reorganization, restructur
ing, would lead to a rethinking of subject matter, with more
interdisciplinary thrusts.
Kendrick: Didn1 t work.
Lage: But people just went on as they had. The changes were
structural, just an administrative reorganization.
Kendrick: Exactly, it was an administrative convenience. That's about all
it was. You're right. Henry is one of the wisest men I ever had
the good fortune to have as a colleague. He's a keen observer.
Lage: Yes, he is.
Administrative Organization of College and Experiment Station
Kendrick: The next problem facing this amalgamation was to find leadership.
The traditional agricultural constituency was not all that
thrilled about this amalgamation. They felt — it turns out they
were right — that this would divert the attention of the faculty
in the experiment station away from their needs. The
amalgamation had another effect on the program of the experiment
station in that the addition of new faculty in the experiment
station took a little different twist because young men and women
who were more compatible with the goals of College of Letters and
Science-type faculty than they were with the fully committed
research faculty that the experiment station had traditionally
added to its faculty were recruited.
Also, faculty are quick learners. They learn that they get
ahea<' almost exclusively by how many good fundamental research
papers they publish in their professional refereed journals, and
143
Kendrick: not how many field plots they put out, from which it is difficult
to accumulate very many good professional journal articles. It's
certainly possible to do so, but it takes a longer period of time
to accomplish. You usually can have only one crop a year, or one
birth cycle per year if you're working with farm animals. If
you're a citrus breeder, you have to wait several years to get a
crop and find out what you've got. That's not the kind of
research program that gets you ahead in the academic world.
So that had an influence on the attention that the faculty
was giving to the citrus, ornamental, vegetable, field crop, and
soil irrigation problems which characterized the southern
Californian agriculture scene.
The man ultimately selected to be the dean was Professor
Willie Mack Dugger. It's not William; it's Willie. A professor
of plant physiology, he came to Riverside from Florida to
investigate the plant physiological disturbances caused by smog.
So he really was brought there in an agricultural program.
Lage: Was he part of that air pollution group?
Kendrick: He was part of the Air Pollution Research Center — that was Mack's
area of affiliation — but he also had a faculty appointment in the
Division of Life Sciences. There again, we return to the small
orbit that the academic community finds itself in sometimes,
because Mack Dugger was a member of that plant physiology
graduate course that Dan Aldrich and Jim Kendrick took in 1942 in
Madison, Wisconsin.
And you all ended up at the University in administrative roles.
Yes. We didn't learn much administration while we were there in
that particular course [laughter]. His appointment was not
really received with much enthusiasm by the agricultural
constituency because he was unknown to them. Even though he had
as much agriculture background as I had, he wasn't fortunate
enough to be identified with an agricultural department. He was
in the Division of Life Sciences, while I was in an aggie
department called plant pathology.
If
Kendrick: By that time the constituency persuaded Hinderaker and Wellman
that they would be better off, when appointing Dean Boyce's
successor, to separate the deanship from the associate
directorship of the Agricultural Experiment Station. It was
customary to have the dean and the associate director of the
experiment station one and the same person. One of the
University of California's confusing anomalies was that there was
no director of the Citrus Research Center because the center was
Lage:
Kendrick :
144
Kendrick : merely one of the units of the University-wide Agricultural
Experiment Station. Deans also carried the titles of associate
director of the Agricultural Experiment Station serving under the
director of the AES in a capacity similar to a member of a board
of directors of the experiment station.
The confusion developed because as I said there was no
director of this Citrus Research Center, but rather an associate
director University-wide, who was responsible for the local unit
and who was resident at Riverside. The Citrus Research Center
and its predecessor the Citrus Experiment Station had gained a
worldwide reputation of its own. So it was often perceived by
those outside the University as a separate unit from the
University's Agricultural Experiment Station.
Lage: It had more of an identity than just as a local unit of the
Agricultural Experiment Station.
Kendrick: It had an identity all its own. That provided confusion as far
as our internal administration was concerned because we did not
have multiple experiment stations, we only had units of the
single University experiment station. The sign on the Citrus
Research Center door said, "Associate Director of the Citrus
Research Center and Agricultural Experiment Station." Visitors
would be confused because they expected to meet the person in
charge, who presumably was a director. Some would say, "Well,
we're not really interested in seeing the associate director,
we'd like to see the director. Where is he?" The answer was,
"Well, the director is Clarence Kelly, and he's in Berkeley."
So it was a tough thing for Al Boyce to deal with, and it
was not really any easier for his successor to deal with.
Lage: I would think the combination of the two jobs would be difficult,
the deanship of the college and the associate directorship of the
station.
Kendrick: The way the responsibility is really discharged is that you have
an associate dean for research and an associate dean for resident
instruction.
Lage: So there's really someone else who's running the Citrus Research
Center.
Kendrick: That's right. The dean and associate director has the overall
responsibility but does not pay day-to-day attention to the affairs.
of the experiment station. There is an associate dean to do that.
Lage: So the Agricultural Experiment Station is a more centralized
operation than the other units of the University.
145
Kendrick: Yes. It's really the only centralized research operation that
the University maintains.
Well, to solve the dilemma of the presumed lack of
agricultural association that was attributed to Mack Bugger, the
administration decided to ask Boysie Day, also a professor of
plant physiology, who was a member of the Department of
Horticulture, however, a fully acknowledged agricultural
department, and who had a lot of field research experience, to
assume the associate directorship. It separated the role of dean
from associate director at Riverside, in contrast, to that which
existed at Berkeley and Davis. It provided a bit of confusion
because it was not really all that clear on what issues Associate
Director Day sought Director Kelly's advice and on what issues he
sought Mack Dugger's advice, and when he was responsible to
Dugger and when he was responsible to Kelly. Boysie, being
pretty much a self-starter and a very capable administrator on
his own, kind of carved out his own path and made his own
decisions. We'll get into that much later.
Lage: These things must have been happening about the time you were
taking over the statewide division.
Kendrick: I had already taken over. It was not known who was going to be
the dean at the time my appointment was made.
Lage: Did you have a role in making that decision to have Boysie Day be
associate director?
Kendrick: No. I don't recall having any role in that, anyway, and I think
I would remember that. That split responsibility was ultimately
resolved, as I will describe later. At the time of my
appointment [E. Gorton] Gort Linsley was the dean and associate
director at Berkeley. He was a professor of entomology, and
James Meyer, who later became the chancellor, was the dean and
associate director of the experiment station at Davis. Jim was a
professor of, I think, animal physiology, but his degree was in
biochemistry, also from the University of Wisconsin. He escaped
taking that same plant physiology course that we did, I think,
otherwise we would have had a real coup. As a matter of fact, he
was at Wisconsin after World War II, later than Dan and Mack and I.
That separation of responsibilities was later solved when
Director Kelly asked Boysie Day to come to Berkeley to be his
assistant and to provide some assistance to him in administering
the systemwide Agricultural Experiment Station. At that time the
associate directorship of the experiment station returned to the
dean at Riverside so we resumed the standard way of handling that
dual responsibility of administration of the respective colleges
and their respective units of the Agricultural Experiment
146
Kendrick: Station. With one person in charge, we didn't have to worry
about who talked to whom about certain issues.
Teaching Responsibilities and the Decline of Mission-Oriented
Research
Kendrick: That separation didn't exist more than two years time, but the
agricultural constituency nevertheless was right in their
concerns. The kind of mission orientation of the experiment
station, I think, began to deteriorate. At that time, the close
focus and attention to the agricultural field problems became
more difficult for the faculty to handle because they had
teaching responsibilities; they knew that their likelihood of
producing productive research in field experimentation was
lessened, and they were in a highly competitive environment to
get their brownie points towards tenure, so that the orientation
of their own research programs became more basic and more
laboratory and greenhouse oriented.
It was restored, to some extent, when Lowell Lewis assumed
one of the associate deanships, with responsibility for the
experiment station activities, under Mack Bugger, the dean. Mack
assembled a good team. There were three of them: Nat [Nathaniel]
Coleman, who was professor of soils, joined the dean's office, so
between Mack Bugger, Nat Coleman, and Lowell Lewis, they had a
real good team. And Lowell Lewis spent a good deal of time with
the external constituency, trying to keep them, if not happy, at
least satisfied that we were concerned about their problems.
Lage: I can foresee a potential problem with the structure of
Riverside, if the dean of this College of Natural and
Agricultural Sciences was a physicist or chemist, who really had
very little connection with agriculture.
Kendrick: The constituency was really concerned about that.
Lage: Bugger did have the connection.
Kendrick: Yes. He was plant-oriented. Riverside does not have an animal
program of any significance. Certainly not domestic animals. So
it's a plant science-oriented activity, with heavy emphasis on
pest management and toxicology and biotechnology. So you are
quite right. If the dean were a physicist or a pure chemist, or
a systematic botanist, the constituency would wonder, "What is
going on now? We've lost agriculture."
Kendrick: Well, I think that puts ma back to Berkeley, when Br. Wellman
asked if I would come by and visit with President Hitch,
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147
VIII VICE PRESIDENT FOR AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES— EARLY CONCERNS
President Hitch's Call for a Long-Range Academic Plan
[Date of interview: October 13, 1987] ##
Lage : Today's October 13, 1987, and this is our seventh interview with
James Kendrick. Today we're going to talk about your appointment
to head up the Division of Agricultural Sciences, and the
environment that you found yourself in.
Kendrick: All right. We have, I think, discussed the physical setting in
which I was first introduced into consideration for the
systemwide vice presidency. That led me to go home and ponder
briefly just what that meant in terms of changing my life,
lifestyle, and career direction — which I pondered for about a
week or so. And as I think I've mentioned, it caused some
disruption in Evelyn's life, because she at that time was active
in the school system in Riverside, as a member of the board of
education.
My discussion with President Hitch about what he really
expected from a vice president was not very revealing. After I
agreed to accept his invitation to join his administration as the
vice president of agricultural sciences (a restoration from the
university dean title to the title of vice president), he made
the statement that the division needed a statement of purpose and
a long-range academic plan. How long? As long as it was prudent
to forecast.
So the first thing I worked on with Harry Wellman, Clarence
Kelly, who was the director of the experiment station, and George
Alcorn, who was the director of the Agricultural Extension
Service, was a statement of what the division was, what it
encompassed, and a little bit about what it intended to do in the
future. That statement served as a guideline, at least a
statement of reference, for the division. I don't have a copy of
it, but it exists in the system.
148
Operating a Centralized Unit within the Decentralized University
System
Kendrick: The thing to remember about the Division of Agricultural
Sciences, as it was known then, is that it was the last remaining
university- wide academic unit, following the decentralization
that dark Kerr instituted during his regime, in which campuses
were given the authority and the autonomy to manage campus
affairs. I had not had much experience with trying to manage — I
didn't have any experience trying to manage a program that
covered more than one campus, in an environment that was
dominated by decentralization and campus autonomy expressed ir.
each campus chancellor's involvement in all things that were
located on their campus. So that was the first environmental
difference with which I had to deal.
Lage: Did this lead to unclear lines of authority?
Kendrick: Yes. It also led to the fact that I had to work out some
processes and techniques to deal with shared authority,
particularly for the experiment station personnel involving
chancellors and deans. On each campus, the head of the
agricultural program held two titles — dean and associate director
of the experiment station. When that individual was operating as
a dean, the authority for his actions was his campus, and his
chief administrative officer was the chancellor. When that
individual was functioning as an associate director of the
experiment station, the authority was the vice president, through
the director of the experiment station.
Nearly all the personnel in the experiment station located
on the campuses were jointly appointed in the professorial series
and in the experiment station series. And at least on paper, the
vice president for agricultural sciences had the authority to
withhold or to allocate authority to fill those FTE [full-time
equivalent] positions in the experiment station. Approximately
an average 70 percent of the FTE-ness was funded in the
experiment station, with an average of about 30 percent funded
from the instructional budget, which came under the authority of
the chancellors. It was obvious that the chancellor and the vice
president had to work out some accommodation to work together, in
order to be able to administer the program and the personnel
involved.
Lage: It seems as if it would get even more complicated when you think
of the faculty responsibility for promotion and tenure on the
Academic Senate Budget Committee.
149
Kendrick: Well, that point was clear even before I got the appointment, in
that the vice president and the director only dealt with resource
allocation, not with personnel administration. So once the
position was authorized for filling, and allocated to a
department or to a college to pursue a particular program,
authority was given to recruit a person for that position. And
that is the last that we — the director and the vice president-
had to do with that particular position, except for the resource
support for it. All the recruitment activities and the oversight
for ultimate evaluation of merit increases and promotion was a
campus affair. I had nothing to do with that, and didn't want
to. It was inappropriate for the vice president to be involved
at that level of individual detail. So that was always
understood.
On the other hand, in the Agricultural Extension Service,
the vice president functioned there like a chancellor, because
the chief administrative officer for the people in extension
ultimately was the vice president, through the director of
extension.
Lage : They didn't have a tie to a campus anywhere.
Kendrick: That's correct. Even though the extension specialists were
residents in departments of their specialty on campuses, they
were recruited, evaluated for merit increases and promotions
through the extension line, and ultimately responsible
administratively to the director and the vice president. So,
part of the personnel of the division was directly responsible to
the vice president, and part of it was not.
In later years of my administration, I did not concern
myself with individual personnel decisions, only with the
allocation of vacated positions to particular programs or
locations. The director acted on all personnel action on behalf
of the vice president.
Reports of Academic and Advisory Group Committees on the
Division's Direction
Kendrick: These things were not clearly apparent when I first arrived. I
had to find those things out for myself. I was also unaware of
the fact that there already was in existence a faculty and
extension committee working on an academic plan. And they were
about finished with their work — they were aiming towards July of
'68 as a completion date, and you'll remember I came on board in
April. They'd been at work nearly nine months already. That
committee had been appointed by Harry Wellman.
150
Kendrick: Now. I assumed that the reason it kind of lost its place in the
sun was because all the other changes that were going on in the
University, such as changing presidents, and Harry being the
acting president for the year while the Regents were searching
for the successor to Clark Kerr, and a general feeling of
treading water and waiting for positions to be filled. It seemed
that the vacancy in the University dean of agriculture position
was something that was really not going to be pursued with any
vigor until there was a president on board.
But that committee worked hard and well, and they produced a
report that was worthy of their efforts. I took it seriously,
and as a matter of fact, I welcomed the fact that it was in
existence because when President Hitch said that we needed an
academic plan, and when I discovered that this committee was in
existence, I said, "Hooray 1 We're already almost able to do
that."
They, in due course, presented me with a plan. I met with
them once or twice, to share some thoughts of my own with them.
But they (the thoughts) weren't very profound because I was
relatively inexperienced and didn't have the background of having
spent nine months working on the plan.
I was aware of another report that had been produced by
Robert Long, who at that time was a senior vice president for
Bank of America and a member of the Agricultural Advisory
Committee for the division. It was a report produced by that
advisory committee and addressed things that the division needed
to pay attention to.
Lage : So this was advice coming from outside the University?
Kendrick: Yes. I was getting some outside advice as well as internal. It
became known as the Long Report. It also contained some valuable
information about the directions of things. Well, all these were
available to me by summer of '68. I had discovered also, not too
long after I had arrived, that the legislature had requested a
report of what the division was doing, a kind of justification of
its existence. And that was the first of many such requests
which came through from the legislature. I had to put together
something I didn't know much about [laughter], and that was a
description of what we were all about, and what marvelous things
we were doing while paying attention to things the legislators
were interested in. That was delivered in a rush. The deadline
was coming down on us in a hurry, related to the budget hearings
in Sacramento. So those were really the first work assignments
that I found myself engaged in.
151
Kendrick: All of the staffing of the division office was in place. The
director of the experiment station was Clarence Kelly; the
director of Agricultural Extension was George Alcorn; and all the
support staff remained in place. I didn't bring anyone with me.
Douglas McNeill was the special assistant to the vice president.
Lage : You mentioned your administrative assistant —
Kendrick: Yes. She was Nona Brown. Nona Brown had served four previous
administrators in the division, and I was the fifth, and her
Waterloo. [laughter]
Lage: Are you going to elaborate on that?
Kendrick: No. We had a good relationship. I think she just wanted to
retire. It was not a problem with her; she was very helpful in
getting me oriented into a lot of things that needed my
attention, and I needed to know about. And she was quite loyal.
There was no real problem. It's just, after so long a time you
get tired where you are, and she was ready to retire.
Lage: I want to hear more about the advisory committee report. When I
read through and looked through the California Farmer for this
period, that is '68-'69, it seemed like things were on fire in
the farm community, that there was a lot of feeling about the
agriculture labor situation, and the farmers felt very much on
the defensive. Now, did this affect that advisory report, or did
it affect your job in another way?
Kendrick: It certainly did affect the position. It didn't affect the
academic plan as much, as I recall — the report which the staff
and faculty committee put together, and that I had high hopes
for. I read it, and I was somewhat disappointed in it, I guess,
because it didn't seem to address what I felt were the current
and future problems; it just alluded to them. It failed to deal
adequately with labor and management, environmental quality,
environmental degradation, and the kind of problems that
agriculture associated with people relationships. It projected
pretty much standard agricultural needs as were known in the
past, and how we needed to do more of what we were doing, do it
better and more efficiently.
Lage: Did the report from the faculty go in that same direction?
Kendrick: That's what I'm talking about.
Lage: Okay — I was thinking about that agricultural advisory —
Kendrick: The Long Committee?
Lage: Yes.
152
Kendrick: The Long Committee was more specific. In fact, it identified
some real problems that needed attention, but most of them were
economic and marketing problems. Those are persistent problems;
they're with us today, and they were with us then. It was less
concerned about needing more pounds, or tons, of agriculture
products than it was on knowing how to handle what was already
produced. The report stated that the University's Division of
Agricultural Sciences didn't seem to be giving the kind of help
expected, or that growers had received in the past, on how to
deal with marketing problems. So one of the first challenges I
met was to pay more attention to these economic and marketing
problems.
Also expressed as a concern was the fact that the
University's Agricultural Experiment Station seemed to be
withdrawing from field-oriented problems. There did not seem to
be as many experiment station individuals out in field plots, or
as often as growers remembered seeing the individuals'
predecessors and other people. They wondered whether or not the
University really had a commitment to agriculture's needs. So
that was another kind of attitudinal climate I inherited with
this assignment.
Lage : Let's go back to that faculty report that you were talking about.
Kendrick: Okay. I perceived that the faculty report had taken a lot of
effort to produce, so, as was standard procedure, I bundled it up
and sent it off to the campuses, to the deans, and said, "Please
take this document and have it reviewed by your faculty, in order
to get some comments, agreements or disagreements." I also said
that I'd like those comments back so that we could discuss what
we're going to do next. I gave them what I thought was an
adequate amount of time, but I don't recall how much. But it was
enough to have faculty input.
I was disappointed to receive nothing in return. Now, I've
got to digress to indicate that two of the campuses were
undergoing changes in their deanships. On July 1 of '68, at
Riverside, Mack Bugger was appointed dean of agriculture and
Boysie Day was appointed associate director of the experiment
station. We discussed earlier the administrative problem this
change presented, and I think it had something to do with the
lack of enthusiasm for a report that Kendrick sent down and asked
for comments.
At Davis, Chancellor [Emil] Mrak was retiring, and they were
looking for a successor for him. The dean of agriculture at
Davis, Jim Meyer, was named Mrak's successsor as chancellor, I
think in the fall of '68. And Chet McCorkle, who had been the
executive vice chancellor for the Davis campus, was named by Jim
Meyer as the dean of agriculture to succeed him. So that was a
153
Kendrick: change in the administration at Davis. The only holdover dean
and associate director was Gort Linsley at Berkeley, not the
largest segment of the division. So the faculty had other things
to think about, other tnan a so-called division master academic
plan. And that explained somewhat the lack of response.
This led me to the conclusion that if my deans' council,
which was the administrative council I continued to meet with
monthly, was persuaded that the plan didn't excite them very
much, or didn't continue to challenge them to spend much time
with it, that it wasn't going to go anywhere. This was another
case where it was something I had no part in initiating, so I
didn't feel any particular ownership of what was produced, and
since it contained what I thought were some deficiencies, it
wound up being a nice exercise without much impact.
Lage: Went on the shelf.
Kendrick: And as I think I said earlier, most academic plans have about as
much impact as dropping a pebble in a pond of water: they cause
a little ripple, and then everything settles back to the way it
was.
Pressure from Farming Community, Legislature, Regents;
The Division in a Defensive Position ##
Lage: Now, let's talk a little bit about how you developed your agenda,
since you didn't rely on the academic plan.
Kendrick: Okay. I'm not quite sure just how I developed what might be
called my agenda. It probably developed in response to concerns
which I had resulting from comments that I received from certain
members of the Board of Regents, and certain members of the
legislature, in the course of their examining the agriculture
budget. You mentioned reading California Farmer during the
period of the sixties and noting that there was a lot of unrest
in the farming community. There was great concern about Cesar
Chavez and his labor organizing operations. The use of
pesticides was also a major concern. Rachel Carson had published
her book Silent Spring in 1962, and the traditional agricultural
community resented that book. They thought it was an intrusion
into their business by someone who ought to know better and
didn't. They disputed many of her facts, really on very shaky
grounds because they didn't have the data to do so.
Lage:
Did the University have data?
154
Kendrick: No, it didn't exist. There were some experiments started when I
was in Riverside, by some of my colleagues in entomology who were
beginning to wonder what would happen downstream several years
from all the insecticides they were putting on the ground. The
experiments were being set up to answer some of these questions,
but there was no hard data to suggest that DDT remained in the
food chain and didn't break down very easily.
Data was also beginning to accumulate in studies at
Riverside and a few other places, showing that resistance to DDT
was showing up in insect populations. So even before it was
banned from use as a bad, persistent insecticide, its broad use
was being phased out because it took more quantity to kill fewer
bugs, and people who were really thinking about that problem
realized that they were dealing with an obsolete chemical.
They moved on to the organic phosphates and found out that
the insects had a marvelous capacity to breed resistance to that
group of compounds, too. So it became kind of a treadmill
effect, which was another problem to deal with. Wide use of
insecticides in agriculture was traditionally accepted as the way
to produce undamaged crops, and we had to begin thinking of
different ways to replace the traditional control measure for
insects and other pests.
Well, with labor and the quality of the environment which
encompassed the fungicide-pesticide problem, another concern was
the consumer. The consumer has never really been very well
organized, even though there are consumer organizations, because
everybody is a consumer, in a sense, and that is a hindrance in
being able to identify what some of the consumer problems were.
Some of those problems related to marketing — which the Long
Committee had identified as being important. All of these were
talked about at Regents' meetings by Fred [Frederick G.] Dutton,
Bill [William M.] Roth, Norton Simon, and several others. I
would have to review the make-up of the Board of Regents at that
time to identify all of the concerned individuals, but Fred
Dutton's constant comments stick in my memory.
Lage: He was trying to urge the division to address some of these
problems?
Kendrick: Well, what he was saying was that the division was nothing more
than a publicly supported research and extension activity for
agribusiness and it cared little for the environment or for farm
labor. He accentuated the notion that the division was an
agribusiness adjunct. That same attitude was dominant in our
legislative hearings, when the budget came into purview, because
Assemblyman [John] Vasconcellos was, even back in 1968, a very
155
Kendrick: vocal critic of the agricultural program in the University. He
made the same kind of allegations that the division cared little
for anything other than large, organized agribusiness.
I may have told you earlier that the term "agribusiness" was
created by a colleague of mine — at least he claimed to be the
author of it. Guy MacLeod, at the time I arrived in Berkeley,
was a special assistant in the vice president's office handling a
program to educate applicators on how to apply pesticides in a
judicious and safe manner. Guy MacLeod was a Ph.D. research
entomologist for a while on the faculty at Berkeley. He went to
Cornell for a while and ultimately wound up back in Fresno as the
owner- ope rat or of a business called Sunland Chemicals. That
business was later sold to one of the large chemical concerns.
Guy was always interested in education and the academic world and
he was a very powerful and influential person in the San Joaquin
Valley. He organized a group of people who supported the
establishment of two agricultural field stations — the Kearney
Field Station and the Westside Field Station. So he was a good
benefactor as far as the division was concerned, but a strong
chemical pesticide advocate.
Lage: When he coined the term, did he mean it as a critical term?
Kendrick: No, he coined it in good faith. I'm not even sure he did it, but
he claimed that he did. I didn't spend any time trying to trace
the origin of that word, so if his claim is valid, that's fine
with me.
He coined the word to describe and convey the notion that
agriculture was a business; it wasn't just a hobby. You had to
approach farming, the production of the commodity, in a
businesslike way. That notion was absolutely correct. You could
not survive in the climate of competition, marketing,
advertising, borrowing to finance the operation, if you don't
understand how businesses operate.
So, in all good faith, he was trying to describe the fact
that the processors, the transportation industry, the retail
markets and the production aspects of agriculture were really
parts of an agribusiness system. But that word was quickly
captured by proponents of the labor- management conflict to
indicate one party of the natural conflict between employer and
employee in agriculture. It was alleged by the non-agribusiness
proponents that the publicly supported programs were skewed
towards benefitting agribusiness and that they were not paying
attention to what the rest of the population really was concerned
about, such as agriculture's use of an excessive amount of water,
the contamination of the environment with pesticides, and the
disregard for quality of their products.
156
Kendrick: That climate was perpetuated by this representation on the Board
of Regents and in the Ways and Means Committee of the assembly,
all of which wasn't wasted on me.
Lage : Yes. I can see that. Agriculture was in a defensive position,
and it looks like your division was as well.
Kendrick: Well, it was swept up in it because, if our program was accused
of paying attention only to one aspect of the total enterprise, I
had to do something about it because I was sensitive to the fact
that we were a publicly supported institution which needed to
support a program that really responded to the total needs of the
state's population.
Lage: So what the critics said does seem to have a certain amount of
truth in it, then?
Kendrick: Oh yes, absolutely, it was correct. It's just the fact that when
you are accused of something, you are resentful. I had a large
operating experiment station and Cooperative Extension Service
people and they didn't like to be told that they were favoring
one segment of society over another. They said, "We're available
to advise anybody that wants to seek it. We're not directing our
activities specifically to agribusiness." The problem with that
answer is that the people and the groups who were complaining
about being on the outside were not accustomed to coming and
knocking on the county agricultural farm advisors' doors and
asking for help. And the sophisticated, organized, business-like
agriculture industries knew where to go to get what they wanted.
Lage: And they had committees set up —
Kendrick: Had parallel committees, and they employed professionals who knew
how to tap into the system, and they used the system. I've never
quite accepted the notion that organized labor was so deficient
that they couldn't have used the system also if they had been a
little more aggressive, but they didn't. They figured that we
were so committed to the agricultural industries as they knew
them that they would be less than welcome if they requested our
assistance, and therefore they didn't even bother to do so. I'm
not sure that they may not have had some unhappy experiences that
sort of cemented that point of view because we had some people
who didn't sympathize with organized labor. It was a very tense
time — they felt if they had anything to say that helped labor,
then they would alienate all these owners and agricultural
enterprises and farmers whom they'd been working with all the
time, and therefore they'd have the other side condemning them.
So it was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't, and
not knowing how to handle it.
157
Broadening Representation on the Agricultural Advisory Council
Lage : So how did you try to move the institution — ?
Kendrick: It was fun. The first thing I did in trying to make that change
was to reorganize the Agricultural Advisory Council. That's the
group of advisors external to the University. When I inherited
it, the committee was composed of chairs and leaders of organized
agricultural groups, such as the tomato growers, the canners, the
citrus growers, the avocado growers, the Agricultural Council of
California, and the Council of California Growers. We had and
still do have a lot of organized commodity marketing groups —
raisin growers, walnut growers, almond growers, cotton growers —
you name it, we've got it.
But that committee as an advisory group, as you can probably
guess, was concerned mainly about the commodities for which each
member was responsible, and the problems associated with those
commodities were mostly production problems, as well as marketing
problems.
I felt that the committee representation needed to be
broadened, so as the members' terms expired I appointed .people
from some of the non-agricultural constituencies. I sought
representation, if not from organized labor, at least from people
who understood labor problems. I appointed a consumer spokesman
who was particularly effective and was the food editor for the
Los Angeles Times. She was not exactly an organizer of consumer
groups, but at least was effective in dealing with the consumers'
interests.
I added a person who was a well-known newspaper writer on
environmental matters. He is still writing the same kind of
columns today — Harold Gilliam, who writes a column that appears
in "This World" in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sundays. He
called me just the other day with a question about California's
agriculture. Harold was a marvelous addition to the advisory
council because he'd ask those embarrassing questions in the most
polite way. [laughter]
The person I asked to bring some sensitivity about labor to
the council was Andy Juvenal. I've lost track of him, but he was
a minister in San Francisco, but not a minister from one of the
main-line churches. He was from the Mission District or
somewhere like that.
Lage: Did he have a connection with agriculture labor — ?
Kendrick: He had — yes — and I can't recall just exactly what it was.
was well informed about agricultural labor.
But he
158
Lage: Did you think of going right to the source and getting somebody
from the farmworkers' union?
Kendrick: Yes. I did. I inquired of the farmworkers' union whom they would
recommend, but they didn't want to participate. They never
wanted to be included in this organization because they thought
they would be co-opted, misused. I think they wanted to be able
to criticise without being made a part of the organization and
subject to being neutralized or at least making it more difficult
for them to be publicly critical. I can understand that; it's a
point of view that I can deal with. But I think that they would
have been a little better served by being willing to sit down and
negotiate some programs or opportunities for their own benefit.
159
IX PUBLIC SCRUTINY AND LEGAL CHALLENGES TO AGRICULTURAL PROGRAMS
Agricultural Mechanization and Farm Labor Opportunities;
Vasconcellos Committee Hearings. 1973
Kendrick
Lage:
Kendrick:
Now, on top of all this social environment, the beginning of the
long, arduous arguments about mechanization and what it does to
farm labor opportunities took place. Agriculture was not
economically all that healthy; it was moving as rapidly as it
could to reduce labor costs. It wished not only to reduce labor
costs, but also its dependency on what was perceived to be a
relatively unstable supply of labor at the time when it was
needed for harvests. Farmers don't have a lot of time to find
people to fill positions and negotiate with them when the fruit
is ripe on the trees or the vines. So to the extent that they
could overcome the labor unrest that Cesar liked to used as a
means of organizing, and to reduce the uncertainty and the
hazards of harvesting, planting, and pruning, the farmers were
more than ready to move to mechanical aids in their farming
practices. And the U.S. universities with agricultural programs,
not just the University of California, and the USDA [U.S.
Department of Agriculture] had comprehensive programs to develop
mechanical aids to the agriculture processes.
How long had those programs been in effect?
quite a ways?
Does this go back
It goes back — yes. You go back to the cotton harvester. I don't
know just exactly when that was, but it was developed before
World War IL I can recall as a youngster in high school,
colleagues of my father working on a mechanical sugar beet
harvester, so that they could raise the sugar beets up onto the
surface of the ground and pick them up in a big rotating sphere
of spikes. This machine was designed to replace workers who
would pull the beets out of the ground, top them, and toss them
into a truck. So the development of mechanical aids to
harvesting was not confined to the tomato harvester alone. It
had progenitors in other produce as well.
160
Kendrick: But the tomato harvester had an interesting life of its own. It
has become the symbol of science-developed mechanical aids
resulting in field labor positions being reduced. That fact was
receiving attention in the legislature also; it was perceived
that the University was paying attention only to farm
management's problems, the farmer's problems, and not the farm
laborer's problems.
Lage : Was it the Agricultural Experiment Station or the Cooperative
Extension Service that would work on developing these machines?
Kendrick: The experiment station. Extension was involved, but only to the
extent of evaluating in the field these developing devices. They
were developed oy the Department of Agricultural Engineering in
the experiment station.
I wanted to relate an incident that sort of characterized my
life before the legislature. It was a particularly long and
dreary afternoon of hearings in the early 1970s, in which a
special session was called by the Assembly Ways and Means
Subcommittee on the University's budget, to listen to the
complaintants about agricultural programs. The session was
chaired by John Vasconcellos, an assemblyman. There was an array
of witnesses, a pretty good-sized room full of people, to listen
to all the allegations about how the University's agricultural
research program was skewed to the right. It was alleged that
the research was not helpful at all because it resulted in the
displacement of farm labor and increased unemployment. It was
stated by the critics that, on the one hand, public funds were
being used to develop mechanical aids for harvests resulting in
increased unemployment which, on the other hand, placed increased
demands on publicly funded welfare programs. You can see that
that allegation provided much food for discussion. It's the sane
argument which is used in pointing out the irony of the U.S.
government supporting programs in tobacco research and, at the
same time, supporting cancer research and pointing out the
connection between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease.
It's not quite as dramatic as the cancer-tobacco situation,
but a lot of discussion was taking place on how the public
representatives could allow such a situation to exist where this
dual activity was counterproductive. Well, we had to listen to a
lot of allegations that were not exactly true; they were
exaggerations about the insensitivity of the people who were
engaged in those kinds of programs. There were allegations also,
which were untrue, that in fact we had no programs addressing
labor displacement. Actually, we did have programs that were
attempting to deal with some of the problems that labor was
facing. But they were kind of buried in the rhetoric of the day.
161
Kendrick: We also had by that time a nutrition education program in
Cooperative Extension addressing nutrition problems of the poor
and trying to teach them how to economize in their food purchases
but at the same time improve the nutritional balance of the meals
which they prepared. But this program was not acknowledged by
the Vasconcellos Committee as useful.
Near the end of the hearing, after listening to all those
allegations, my turn came to respond. The rhetoric was full of
acrimony, and feelings were really tense. I asked Assemblyman
Vasconcellos if I could begin my testimony with a representative
who was a small farmer, a Mrs. Sally Oliver. He said, "Certainly,
you can." Sally had been livid all afternoon. She was almost
beside herself with emotion because she was concerned about what
she perceived to be much misrepresentation of her situation.
When she came to the table to testify, she could hardly
control her voice; she was really emotional. She said she had
listened to all these allegations against the University's
program by people who didn't have any idea what farming was all
about. There wasn't a farmer among all who had testified. They
were either academics or they were — I forget the terms she used;
they weren't very complimentary. She said she was there as a
farmer's wife, and furthermore, she was there as a small farmer's
wife. They had about sixty acres of almonds and walnuts, and she
said to the members of the subcommittee, "Have you ever tried to
knock almonds out of a tree with a pole? If you haven't, then
you ought to try it. And if you've got thirty-five or forty
acres of almond trees that you have to harvest the nuts from with
a pole, it is one tough business."
II
She went on to say that the only reason they were able to
sustain themselves in farming at all was because of the help
they'd gotten from the University of California, and in
particular in their mechanical harvesting aid program. That
program had developed a means of harvesting almond nuts from
trees with a mechanical shaker so that they didn't have to knock
the nuts from the trees, as they once did, by hand-held poles.
Well, her emotional support and the fact that she was a
farmer's wife who obviously did more than just cook in the
kitchen — she was out working in the field — changed the atmosphere
in that hearing almost immediately. We weren't able to change
their minds at all, but we certainly changed their politeness and
their receptivity as far as the subsequent testimony was
concerned, where we tried to set the record straight. But I
always identify that hearing as symbolic of the environment we
typically had to deal with in terms of having the University's
agricultural program accepted and understood generally.
162
Lage: It's also interesting, I think, for the purpose of this history
to see what the forces were that led to change in the program.
Was this testimony all taking place during the University's
budget review in the legislature?
Kendrick: Yes. The annual review.
Lage: So you'd be called upon to defend your program.
Kendrick: Any time the agricultural budget was up for legislative review, I
was the spokesperson for it. And that's the time I had to deal
with criticism and the critics. If we happened to have budget
proposals for new programs, I and a few expert witnesses would be
there to defend them. During this antagonistic climate of
allegations and criticism of the University's agricultural
program for lack of attention to the plight of the farm worker,
and for not doing enough for the small and economically stressed
farmers, or for underfunding migrant children's education, I gave
the legislature ample opportunity to augment the budget for these
programs, by putting in requests in the University's budget.
These requests were denied; in fact, on several occasions our
budget was reduced, and it was suggested that I ought to
reallocate what I already had to these programs if I felt they
needed augmented support. The only way I could really reallocate
within the University's budget was to discharge people, and that
doesn't happen without just cause. Their suggestion just wasn't
very practical.
Budget and Personnel Problems in Nutrition Education
Kendrick: The other two programs that caused problems for the division were
associated with 4-H and nutrition in Cooperative Extension.
These two programs were expanding their traditional rural
homemaker clientele and the rural youth leadership and commodity
training programs into the inner city, into the poorer segments
of our society.
Lage: Now, how did that change occur?
Kendrick: Well, the nutrition education program developed because of a
federal appropriation through the USDA to Cooperative Extension
to establish a nationwide network of expanded nutrition education
programs. It resulted in an allocation to the University of
California's Cooperative Extension of three to four million
dollars a year. It didn't start at that level; it started at
less than that level, but it grew to be about that much over a
fifteen-year period.
163
Kendrick: But the fundamental problem with that program was that it was not
indexed for any increase in costs. It took time to get it
started so initially there was a surplus of funds, but once we
got it geared up and running, there was no augmentation to take
care of salary increases and expanded program needs. The federal
appropriation was fixed by a formula which didn't include a cost
of living adjustment. That meant in order to accommodate the
needs for growth in salaries, we had to plan program reductions
over time. The only way to do that was to eliminate some
temporary positions in the nutritional education program.
The program was administered by regular Cooperative
Extension personnel in the family and consumer science program,
so their funding and their support was not dependent on this
special appropriation. Most of the funds were expended in
employing people half time as "nutrition aides." There were a
few nutrition aide supervisors also supported by these funds.
The nutrition aides were recruited from the economically stressed
communities where they were expected to go back and conduct the
education program. Their clientele were the people who often
were very poorly educated and very poverty stricken, and in many
instances single-parent units.
Those nutrition aide recruits were given special training in
the four basic food groups and became a very valuable part of the
extension employment staff. But when adjustments in our
personnel employment were needed, they were the ones who we had
to adjust out of the program. They didn't understand why this
was taking place for them, when they could see their supervisors
being retained.
Lage: Now, why were they the ones that had to go?
Kendrick: Because they were on the special funds that were not being
augmented. And those were the funds that I was trying to get the
State of California to augment so we could take care of the
situation, but the legislature was totally unresponsive, as was
Mr. Vasconcellos — and that's where the augmentation had to start.
His committee was totally unresponsive. Their consistent answer
was, "Well, that's a federal program, and any augmentation should
come from the federal government." That was certainly an
insensitive answer as far as I was concerned.
I could see what was coming: the federal money was going to
dry up in due course; it was just not going to grow rapidly
enough to meet the needs, and we were going to be faced
continually with having to shrink the size of the programs to
match the dollars available, and we had to provide some kind of
backstop contingency fund, to meet anticipated obligations.
164
Lage: Would it have been possible to reallocate, as the legislature
told you to? What was the difficulty with that?
Kendrick: Not unless I discharged staff.
Lage: You'd be discharging people in other programs.
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: And hiring them in this program.
Kendrick: Yes. It didn't make sense to me. As long as those other
programs were meeting some needs too. Reallocation is a popular
suggestion of budget analysts, but in people-concentrated
programs it is difficult to achieve without significant layoffs.
In the Agricultural Experiment Station, about eighty percent of
the faculty have tenure. You can't discharge those people,
except for cause. You can separate them if there is a critical
budget stringency, but not just to reallocate funds.
Lage: So your hands were not completely free.
Kendrick: No, I was not free to take what was perceived to be a fairly
large and significant allocation to the Division of Agriculture
for programs and reallocate that every year to programs which
seemed to be surfacing. Although that's really a fundamental
problem for the University as a whole, it presented me with a
problem for almost all of the eighteen and a half years I was
responsible for the agricultural program. The only way I could
really establish a new program was to get new money because I
couldn't free up enough existing committed funds to really make a
difference. That's because the money was primarily tied up in
the salaries of people.
Lage: Now, the people you put in charge, or who were put in charge of
the nutrition education, came from a more traditional program.
Is that the case?
Kendrick: That's true.
Lage: Had they been involved with nutrition education?
Kendrick: Some of them.
Lage: But in a more middle-class setting, or — ?
Kendrick: In a different client audience. During the war. World War II,
there was a big effort made by extension to help in the Victory
Garden movement by helping people identify things they could grow
and teaching them how to grow the vegetable crops. They also
were involved in teaching people how to preserve their produce by
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Kendrick: canning or freezing methods. So extension had the talent for
that kind of education program. But they weren't dealing with
migrants; they weren't dealing with farm labor people —
Lage: This must have created problems in personnel, because the
traditional extension people were supervising aides who came out
of these communities that the supervisors had very little
connection with previously.
Kendrick: That's true. The main problem came when we had to cut back the
work force and we didn't cut back traditionally longtime
employees of extension. The ones whom we had to separate were
the last employed, the least educated, who were most in need of
employment. I must say the program wasn't a total loss because
we trained a lot of people along the way who moved on into other
employment positions and didn't stay with us. They found full-
time positions elsewhere. So that part of the program was
completely successful because we helped a number of people gain
employment elsewhere.
But I'm kind of critical of the program because to some
extent it duplicated the programs of some other agencies of
government where working with the poor was primarily their main
assignment, and it was not necessarily extension's main
assignment; it's only one of many programs. I think our program
has become more of an employment opportunity program than a
nutritional education program, and that's not what extension is
all about. It's not primarily a stepping-stone to other
employment opportunities.
Lage: It seems in conception like a really good program; extension has
the mechanism in place for reaching out into the community.
Kendrick: True. But there is also the county health department, and the
county welfare department, and food stamps are available. Why do
you need another agency to address the same target audience?
That's really the main problem, I think, with extension's
nutritional education program. I have to say, however, that I
think California has one of the best nutritional education
programs in the country, and I don't think it was a loss at all,
but it certainly caused a lot of personnel problems.
Lage: I think you were going to lead into some of that, I misdirected
you —
Kendrick: Well, that's a little ahead of the story, and I'll get into that
when we spend more time on extension. This social climate did
not prevail early in the program, but gradually developed after
the first two or three years of its successful implementation.
166
Lage: So this nutrition education program and the mechanization were
issues early on?
Kendrick: Yes, relatively early in my tenure. The nutrition education
program was initiated about 1970 or '71. The mechanization issue
was an issue almost from the start of my tenure as vice
president.
The University's Development of the Tomato Harvester
Kendrick: Let me say a little bit about the tomato harvester because it was
such a unique case, and it occupied a lot of my time.
Tomatoes in California, the large fields of tomatoes, are
grown for processing — ketchup and paste and soups. Up until
about 1964, they were harvested by hand by a labor force that was
largely transient from Mexico. They were imported legally for
the period of time needed to harvest the produce, and called
braceros. About 1964, my predecessor, Dan Aldrich, participated
on a panel to study farm labor. As a result of the panel's
study, they recommended phasing out the bracero program, which
ultimately was done. The bracero program was terminated about
1965. So Aldrich's activity occurred before 1965.
Going back even further. Jack Hanna, an experiment station
employee in the Department of Vegetable Crops at Davis, responded
to a farmer's question one day about "What would ever happen to
us if we didn't have the bracero program?" His response was,
"Well, we've got to find a way to harvest these things
mechanically. "
So ten or twelve years before 1964, Jack Hanna was busy
breeding a variety of tomato with a compact vine with the fruit
that ripened all at once. This was the key to the concept of a
mechanical harvester because to harvest the field it is necessary
to destroy the vine by pulling it from the ground, lifting it
onto a shaker that shakes the dirt and fruit off the vine and
carries the fruit onto another conveyer belt where workers riding
the harvester finish the hand culling.
Jack Hanna got Coby Lorenzen of the Department of
Agricultural Engineering of Davis interested in designing this
mechanical harvester. So by 1964, the two of them had pretty
well completed the necessary breeding and mechanical design
necessary for harvesting these tomatoes mechanically. They had
interested a manufacturing firm in Rio Vista, the Blackwelder
Manufacturing Finn in putting the machine together as a
167
Kendrick: commercial venture, so that they would have something that the
farmer could use that wasn't just an experimental machine from
the University.
So when the bracero program ended —
Lage: Was there any connection between the ending of the program and
the fact that this harvester was in place, do you think?
Kendrick: No, that was serendipity. The thoughtful ness of the program was
that Coby Lorenzen and Jack Hanna had foresight enough back a
dozen years or so to begin thinking about what they would do in
case something happened to the labor supply. That was a dramatic
anticipation of something which eventually did happen. There was
a lot of money invested in the processing of tomato plants. The
processing of tomatoes was the backbone of the canning industry
in California. It supported the peach canning, pear canning, and
all the rest of the fruit canning operation. Tomato canning
really was the money-maker. That industry was very nervous about
the ending of the bracero program because of what it might do to
tomato production, and to this processing industry. They were
prepared to move it to Mexico where the labor supply would be
available if they had to.
Well, because of these early machines and their
availability, between 1964 and 1968 fields harvested mechanically
went from ten or fifteen percent to nearly ninety percent in a
short four-year period. No other agricultural development really
has developed quite that rapidly. It was a very dramatic change
in the way of handling tomatoes: the tomato variety changed and
the mechanical harvesters were everywhere —
Lage: Did it affect the size of the operation? Did you have to have a
larger operation to make use of the harvesting machine?
Kendrick: Acreage was increased. You don't use a tomato harvester en two
acres of tomatoes. It's a fairly expensive investment. A part
of the criticism of the University program is that by developing
the harvester we forced small farmers out of business, and only
the large farmers could survive. Well, the records show that a
lot of those who grew tomatoes previously were not growing these
processing tomatoes following the introduction of the harvester.
That didn't mean they went out of business; they just changed
their crop and grew something different, not tomatoes. Or they
sold their small acreages to larger growers where it was
economical to use a harvester.
Also, the critics overlooked the fact that the industry was
going to move out of California, period. The processors were
prepared to move. There wouldn't have been any place for the
168
Kendrick: small tomato grower to peddle his crop anyway. But that's all
part of the rhetoric that you have to deal with in any kind of
testimonial situation when you're dealing with this problem.
In 1972, a person who is presently the commissioner of
agriculture for Texas named Jim Hightower published a book
filled — and I'll show my prejudice — with half-truths, called Hard
Tomatoes, Hard Times.
Lage : Now, you have to admit that the tomatoes are hard. [laughter]
I'll show my prejudice.
Kendrick: Yes, I'll show you mine, too. The problem with that book and
the allegation is that he was condemning the harvester, and the
thick-skinned tomato that was developed for the mechanical
harvester, not only thick-skinned, but it was thick- fie shed. The
locules inside were full of flesh, and not the usual kind of
tomato with a lot of gelatinous material and openness — those in
the trade call it "high in solids." Less water, and more solids.
Lage: Is that because it was less easily bruised?
Kendrick: Yes, well they wanted more solids for carrying it in the harvest
equipment and the conveyors afterward. You know, you see these
tomatoes going down the highway in these great big bins? You can
imagine what the tomato on the bottom would look like if it
didn't have some sort of solid structure to preserve itself and
not become a bunch of paste in the bucket.
The allegation throughout the book was that the agricultural
scientists had lost sight of the fact that they were dealing with
quality products, and they were responding to the needs of
agribusiness again, the canning industry, by developing this
tasteless, hard tomato — they were about like a golf ball — at the
expense of really being concerned with what the consumer wanted.
The fallacy of that argument was that the tomato industry in
California utilizing the harvester was the processing tomato. In
all the years when I was the vice president, no one wrote to me
and complained about the taste of ketchup or paste. That's where
those tomatoes go. They were not fresh-market tomatoes.
Lage: And also the canned?
Kendrick: Well, even those are a different variety. The reason that we
have such a lousy tomato in the fresh market is not because they
were bred for mechanical harvesting; it's because they're grown
away from the source of the retail market. Even when I was
working as a plant pathologist trying to control some tomato
blight diseases in southern California in San Diego County, the
standard practice of harvesting those tomatoes was to pick them
when they were what was called "pinks," the shoulder of the
169
Kendrick: tomato was just beginning to turn from green to orange. If you
picked them any later than that, they would destroy themselves
before they ever got to market. They subsequently found that
they could make those rocks look like tomatoes by submitting them
to ethylene gas. a natural product, and they would ripen up and
look red as they could be, but if you pick a tomato green, it's
never going to get any better than the day you picked it. It's
not like a honeydew melon which gets a little sweeter and softer
after you take it home and let it sit around a while. But not a
tomato.
There's plenty of room to condemn the way you handle fresh
market tomatoes, and I will join the crowd that would criticise
their taste, but it's because you have to buy a vine-ripened
tomato pretty close to its source in order to get a good tomato.
If the Bay Area are buying tomatoes that are produced in Mexico
or San Diego [laughs], it's not going to be a good quality
product.
Lage : So that's a separate problem —
Kendrick: That's a separate issue altogether. But Hard Tomatoes, Hard
Times did not make that distinction. It was used as another bit
of evidence that agribusiness again had captured the activities
and the research programs of these publicly supported programs.
The book was published in 1972 by the Washington D.C.-based
foundation, the Agribusiness Accountability Project.
fi
Lage: Did they use California in particular as a case in point?
Kendrick: They sure did.
Lage: — because you're the ones that developed it.
Kendrick: Yes. Florida came in for a certain amount of criticism, but the
harvester was the focal point of the criticism.
Lage: Now, this man is now commissioner of agriculture?
Kendrick: Yes, in Texas. He's a Texan. Texas elects its agricultural
commissioner. He's a politician and aspires to be governor or
some other elective officer.
In talks I've given, I've tried to identify what I thought
were major landmarks that pushed for change in the agricultural
awareness, at least in the research programs. Each of these was
kind of resentfully received and caused us a lot of anguish. We
felt abused by being falsely accused of conspiracies and so
forth, but they did have an impact, and they were not all wrong.
170
Kendrick: The things I've cited — the first turning event was Rachel Carson,
who really drew attention in a dramatic way to the fact that we
were destroying the environment by not paying attention to what
any of these pesticides that we were using to kill the bugs was
doing to the bird populations. This was a first in calling
attention to the adverse effects of DDT and other insecticides.
She published her book Silent Spring in 1962. At that time, we
were, as a land-grant institution, emphasizing production
agriculture at the expense of the consumer's desires, labor
needs, and all that. So the two books. Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times
and Silent Spring, published a decade apart, called attention to
three concerns: farm labor displacement, quality of produce, and
effects of pesticides on the environment. Each has had an impact
on changing the emphasis of agricultural research.
Now there is another one that we're having to deal with, and
that's Jeremy Rifkin's concern about what biotechnology is apt to
do about upsetting the naturalness of things. He sues and
countersues the testing of the ice-minus microbe in the field and
claims that we don't know what we're doing sufficiently well by
introducing these genetically altered strains of microbes into
the environment. He suggests that they could take over and
produce adverse consequences that we are not able to handle.
Rifkin has not written a book on the subject, but he and his
small enterprise have caused the biotechnology movement
considerable extra work and resentment. This is the fourth
impact on changing the way agricultural research is being
conducted today. If we can swallow our pride and that initial
reaction to say, "What the hell does he know about it," and
realize that the general public really doesn't understand what
these scientists are up to, we can make these changes and be
better off for doing so. But the public knows that some adverse
developments have come from science and if it can't be reassured
that nothing but good can come out of scientific discoveries, it
is not sure that the risk is worth taking. Science has a
continual job to inform the public fully about what it is doing
to benefit society.
Regents' Meeting on Mechanization and Labor Displacement, 1978
Kendrick: These are all forces that get your attention and you respond.
You ignore them at your own peril. So here I inherited the
Rachel Carson concern for environment, and I was right in the
middle of the Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times mechanical harvest
controversy that is still in existence. And that concern
progressed through the legislature to the next big event in the
mechanical argument, at a Regents' meeting. That resulted in the
171
Kendrick
Lage:
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick:
first public session of the Regents devoted to one topic, in
which external testimony was invited. They were meeting in the
Convention Center in Los Angeles on February 16, 1978.*
There was so much pressure about the issue — by letters — that
the lieutenant governor, Merv [Mervyn] Dymally, a Regent,
requested a public hearing at a Regents' meeting.
So it came through the political officers —
Right.
And how about the other regents?
Button stand?
Where did people like Fred
Fred was not on the board at the time. His term expired, or he
didn't attend that meeting. But this hearing in Los Angeles
became quite an affair. They moved to a large room to
accommodate the audience and to listen to about thirty witnesses
with prepared talks. Tom Hayden was one of the witnesses; he was
not an assemblyman at the time, but he was at the height of his
advocacy of his California campaign for Economic Democracy, which
proposed redistribution of wealth and land ownership. Cesar
Chavez was the star of the show because he appeared in kind of a
dramatic march down the center aisle to the table to give his
statement about what had happened to the farmworkers because of
the University's program. I also gave a statement, in much less
dramatic fashion.
Was it a tough act to follow?
I didn't think so. I'm not being disrespectful; he had the
charisma and the following, but —
And sort of the emotional appeal.
I didn't have to follow him. I was the first to give a
statement. So they all had to follow my statement. But I had
arranged for the Regents to hear a balanced presentation. It
wasn't at all going to be like I had experienced in Sacramento
where I felt like I was in a kangaroo court. It was really kind
of an interesting afternoon. Long, and inconclusive, because
there were sincere representations of a concern expressed by both
* On deposit in University Archives, The Bancroft Library, are 1)
the oral statements made and letters received by the Regents'
Committee on Educational Policy in regard to Farm Mechanization
Research for the February 16, 1978, hearing; 2) a summary of
these materials prepared by the Division of Agricultural Sciences.
172
Kendrick: pro and con mechanical aids versus labor needs and the like.
There were a few allegations that were rather unfounded and
unfactual. I thought, but they were not really significant. They
were emotional appeals about "I lost my job, and what are you
going to do about it?"
The proposed remedy really was not that the University
researchers cease and desist their work in these areas, but that
because they were causing labor displacement, it was felt that
the field workers ought to be compensated in some fashion for
their loss of jobs. And it was alleged that it was the
University's obligation to provide that compensation for those
lost job opportunities. It was my position that that was not the
University's role; I recognized it as a problem that society had
to do something about, but not the University. As a matter of
fact, the University prior to my tenure had received a special
allocation from the legislature of about $100,000 to pursue a
research program in developing mechanical aids for harvesting and
other agriculture programs. So we had on the books a special
appropriation to foster the development of mechanical aids, and
we had nothing on the books to support studies that would help
deal with the problem of labor displacement and retraining
programs, redirecting labor into other areas of —
Lage: Did you ever apply for that kind of program, do you recall?
Kendrick: Yes, we had some requests for that. But they got lost in the
shuffle of budget building.
I also was not enthusiastic in applying for that kind of
program, because we did not really have enough competence within
agriculture to pursue those kinds of problems. The only
competence in this area existed in our departments of
agricultural economics and with an extension economist. We have
a Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences at Davis that gave
some attention to the problem. I don't think it was as
thoughtful as it could have been. It was largely a criticism of
what had been done, and a concern that they were never allocated
enough money to do what they wanted to do. And the problec was
that they never were allocated enough money because the programs
that they applied for support weren't very good as evaluated by
their colleagues.
We had a particular critic at the University of California
at Santa Cruz in the sociology department, William Friedland, who
had come from Cornell, who continues to be concerned about the
sociology of agriculture. His criticism is not based too
strongly on factual information, though it's better than some of
the other stuff that has come through.
173
Kendrick: But there's been this constant current of criticism of the
traditional agricultural research programs, and it hasn't just
been Cesar Chavez and the organized labor people like him. but
it's been colleagues in the sociology department. I've
maintained all along that to hold the Division of Agriculture
responsible for this is shortsighted. You need to hold the
University of California responsible for addressing some of these
issues, because there we have an Institute of Industrial
Relations both on the Berkeley campus and the UCLA campus that
specifically addresses labor- management problems. They've got
talent and experience that can address those issues. There's
nothing reassuring by asking only an agricultural engineer to
understand what labor-management problems are. We do, as I said,
have two or three experts in our agricultural economics
department that I think have produced some very useful
information about labor and handling the labor. And extension
itself has developed programs with specially employed personnel
who are trying to acquaint employers with how to handle appropri
ately agricultural labor. And they've been very good programs.
We haven't been ignorant of those needs. It's just been
hard for people to recognize that they're not programs that you
put millions of dollars into, so that if you compare the numbers
of dollars going into the ag engineering department, compared
with the numbers of dollars going into ag economics department,
there's a vast difference. But you're buying hardware and
machinery in the engineering departments, and you buy chalk and
paper and calculators and computers in ag economics. So there is
a difference in the required support, but we pay the people on
the same general wage scale.
Lage : Now, would it have been your job to ask for positions to be
opened up, or to open up positions to people who had labor
expertise or economic expertise?
Kendrick: Yes. It was my job to provide a budget adequate enough to
address the issues that were —
Lage: But you would also tell them where you wanted people added?
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: Or would each local unit — ?
Kendrick: Well, let me finish the Regents' meeting, and then I'll get into
that question.
After this long afternoon, the Regents closed off that
hearing with, "Thank you very much, we appreciate all of you
being here today, and we feel better informed about the subject,"
and that dropped it. That was the end of it.
174
Lage: No direction?
Kendrick: No direction to me to change my program one iota. It was not
business as usual, but I had tried to respond to the fact that we
were not ignoring the problem, that there was more than the issue
of just a few jobs of picking tomatoes at stake — there were
cannery workers, who were now employed, and who might not be
employed without the harvester; there was the processing industry
that was several hundred million dollars in value that had
threatened to be displaced and moved to Mexico. So that we had
retained an industry in California by this development that meant
much more to the state economically than just a few field worker
positions. It was wrong to take a snapshot view of the problem,
in my opinion.
Without trying to minimize the agony of the people who were
losing their jobs, we tried to suggest to them that it was a
state problem, a social problem to deal with, and not the
University's sole problem. So much for that — but that was a much
better episode than the legislative hearing.
Legal Action Challenging the University's Agricultural Program.
1979
Kendrick: We still had criticism from the Agrarian Reform group in Davis.
lhat group continued to saw away at the notion that our program
ignored the needs of the working people and was primarily
associated with making farmers rich. Ultimately, the California
Rural Legal Assistance [CRLA] joined with this Agrarian Reform
group at Davis and filed suit in 1979 against a number of named
individuals, including Regents, the President, me, and others, on
the basis that we were misusing public funds and violating the
law: the federal Hatch Act and the federal Smith-Lever Act. The
Hatch Act is the law that authorized the Agricultural Experiment
Station expenditure and that includes some appropriations, and
the Smith-Lever Act is the one that authorizes the existence of
Cooperative Extension, and allocates for that.
Lage:
Lage:
And when do these acts date from?
Kendrick: The Hatch Act was passed by Congress in 1887, and the Smith-Lever
Act in 1914. So they go back. They've been amended in the
meantime to update them, so they're still in force and still
current, and the fundamental description of why they were
instituted is still valid.
And what did they feel was in violation?
175
Kendrick: As far as the Hatch Act was concerned, the plaintiffs felt that
there was a statement of the intent of the Hatch Act that the
experiment station's activity should work towards full employment
in the rural community. Now, there is a statement that says it
is the goal of the Hatch Act to establish these experiment
stations in such a way that they will promote the economic
welfare of agriculture, and establish the rural community on a
par with the urban community. In 1887, the rural community was
really disadvantaged. All the wealth was concentrated in the
urban areas, and cities were favored ground as far as society was
concerned. So that the act addressed itself to neutralizing some
of this difference and provide the rural community with attention
and research that would match research needs for industry.
And it had a statement that it intended to promote the
economic welfare of agriculture, and all the other things
including full employment. It is not clear whether it refers to
full rural employment or just full employment in general — but the
suit hung itself on this alleged insensitivity and lack of
attention to full rural employment and farm labor in particular,
therefore alleging a violation of the intent of that law.
They also accused us of misusing the public trust. That's a
state statute which says that it's against the law for any public
entity to take public funds and grant them to private enterprise
for private gain. Their assumption was that because we were
active in developing mechanical aids which machinery
manufacturers built and large farming interests used, that these
were the only beneficiaries, and therefore we were taking public
money for private gain, and that was the violation.
But that wasn't the main example that they hung their hats
on — mostly it was the fact that experiment station people and
some extension people were evaluating chemical products from
chemical companies as to the effectiveness of herbicides and
pesticides. It was perceived that we were using those publicly
supported positions to provide information to the chemical
companies which they otherwise would have to buy for themselves
at much greater cost than a few modest grants- in- aid. Without
giving us the benefit of the fact that we were not doing it for
the benefit of the chemical companies, we were trying to find
something that would control the diseases and the pests of plants
and animals. So that was the basis for that argument.
Lage: So it didn't just focus on mechanization.
Kendrick: No. They also initially accused a few of us of conflict of
interest because we had some ties with some other business
concerns. I did for a while serve as a member of the board of
directors of the Tej on Agricultural Corporation and found it to
be one of the most beneficial educational exposures of my life.
176
Kendrick: It was hard to translate to the likes of the Agrarian Reform
group that that was an educational experience [laughter]. It was
perceived in their eyes as providing Tejon with a special inroad
into the University. Several Regents were named because they had
stock in companies that were agriculturally oriented or serviced
agriculture, or they owned farm property. That part of the suit
was dropped, very early on.
The Smith-Lever part of that suit was based on the fact that
the Smith-Lever Act does not say specifically that extension
personnel should engage in research. And of course, all the time
that I was in office, and prior to my being there by a couple of
years, extension made no bones of the fact that they were engaged
in an applied, localized research program, and we expected our
personnel to engage in that kind of program. And the allegation
was that we were violating the spirit and the language of the
Smith-Lever Act by diverting Smith-Lever funds into research
activities and not strictly extension activities.
We were prepared for a long argument with that because
research is research is research is research. The act does say
that education was conducted through meetings, workshops.
publications, demonstrations, and otherwise. The demonstrations
are used by our colleagues in other states to satisfy what we say
is research. We were not joined enthusiastically by our
colleagues in other states; they just turned their backs and ran
the other way when the suit was filed. They didn't want to get
swept up into it.
U.S. Department of Agriculture's Reaction to the Lawsuit
Kendrick: We had a very difficult time getting the Department of
Agriculture to engage in any kind of interest in this suit, and
in particular the extension unit of USDA. They felt they would
have a difficult time, and they would lose the battle if they
recognized the fact that we were engaged in research — overlooking
the fact that we are required to file every year an annual plan
of work in which we describe what we're going to do and also
report what we had done. They sign off and approve it each year.
Lage : But then, when the suit came up, they didn't want to step in to
support — ?
Kendrick: When the suit came up, they didn't want to have a thing to do
with providing us with any testimony that the program was a good
extension program.
H
177
Kendrick: Finally, out of frustration with my federal extension office, I
resolved it by going to the deputy secretary of agriculture,
today's secretary of agriculture, Dick Lyng.
Lage: Now, what administration was this?
Kendrick: This was under John R. Block, of the Reagan administration.
Under Bob Bergland of the Carter administration, I didn't have a
lot of sympathy in the secretary's office. Early in his life as
the secretary of agriculture — he'd been a congressman from
Minnesota — he made a tour in California and had a conference in
Fresno. And of course, when the secretary of agriculture travels
around the country, he's got an entourage of people who want to
talk to him. That's one office that doesn't have any trouble
drawing a crowd. Although it's not a cabinet office of the
stature of the secretary of defense or secretary of state, its
constituency follows that secretary around like a fly does a
piece of meat.
Bergland listened to the same kind of allegations that I'd
been listening to, and he made a statement in Fresno to the press
that he was going to put a stop to any federal funds going into
any mechanical aids to harvest. That stimulated me. I wrote an
editorial about "Is the Department of Agriculture changing its
policy?" Because it was such a sweeping statement; they were
indicating that we were going to get the tractors out of the
field; we weren't going to fund anything that was a mechanical
aid to agriculture. And I couldn't believe that a person who
knew anything at all about agriculture would make such a
sweeping, blanket statement.
And I began getting calls. "Are your federal funds cut
off?" "No," I replied, "they were never touched, never in
j eopardy. "
Lage: No follow up on that statement?
Kendrick: Nothing.
Lage: What percentage of your funds were federal funds?
Kendrick: About five percent.
Lage: Oh, that small?
Kendrick: Five percent Hatch funds. There were a lot of other federal
funds that go into the total research program, but not through
the Hatch fund, and that's what he was talking about.
Lage:
How about the response from Earl Butz? Was he more — ?
178
Kendrick: Earl was secretary under Richard Nixon, much earlier than the
period of the trial. Well. Earl [laughs] was the typical,
traditional, old-line agriculturalist. His support was
unshakable. So I had no problem with Earl ever.
I'd like to say a bit more about Secretary Block's deputy
secretary of agriculture, Dick Lyng, who is the present secretary
of agriculture. Dick and I started out life together here in
California with the Reagan administration as governor. Dick was
the deputy director of the Department of Agriculture at the time
when I became the vice president for agricultural sciences. So
we worked together for a while until he went to Washington to
become a Washington bureau man. A bureaucrat, in a kind sense of
the word.
So I finally, in frustration, went to Dick and said, "You
know, I'm getting nowhere in the department." It was resclved.
Not enthusiastically by extension, I might add. They didn't
provide the kind of testimony that I think they should, but it
was not damaging. But my problem with the federal department is
that they were ignoring a potential serious threat to
Agricultural Extension nationwide. If we were to lose that suit
on that issue, that meant that extension could not and should not
engage in any kind of activity that passed as research. And that
would just take them out of business. I don't think that the
department and the administrators of the federal extension
program appreciated that fact whatsoever. They should have been
following this much more closely than that, and provided some
kind of aid and assistance, or owned up to the fact that they
were approving our work plan every year.
The University's Response and Current Status of the Suit
Lage: It sounds as if you took quite an active role in responding to
the legal suit. How did that work within the University? There
must have been a whole array of lawyers; how much did you have to
devote to it?
Kendrick: Well, it didn't take a lot of personal time from me, but I
obviously was in touch with what going on, was consulted
regularly about strategy. The people within the University
pursuing the legal aspect of the suit were in the general
counsel's office. The thing that's amusing about that is that
the California Rural Legal Assistance group had about two lawyers.
They were joined at one stage by Public Advocates, a public
interest law firm in San Francisco, where there were two lawyers.
They spent a lot of time taking depositions. Th-.y deposed, or at
least they had plans to depose, about seventy or eighty people.
179
Kendrick: They filed suit in 1979, and they didn't go to trial until about
'84. All that period was used to depose and collect data and
look through many files. They would file a brief, and our
general counsel's group would respond to it. We wore out one
superior court judge in Alameda County, Judge [Spurgeon] Avakian,
who got ill in the course of the trial. And so it was declared a
mistrial, and we had to start all over again with another Alameda
County Superior Court judge, Judge [Raymond] Marsh. He is a
sitting judge in Hayward.
I became pretty well acquainted with a good many members of
the general counsel's office, and of course I was a colleague of
the general counsel, the late Don Reidhaar and his successor
[James E. Hoist], who took more than a casual interest in the
suit. But Gary Morrison was the member of the general counsel's
staff who really had the primary responsibility for the suit.
George Marchand was a colleague; Christine Helwick was another
one. The names of the others don't come to mind, but there were
about six lawyers in the general counsel's office who, when the
CRLA suit was on the docket, were all engaged in this thing. So
we had numerous conferences over strategy and what to do next.
The status of the suit now is as follows (then we can kind
of draw this session to an end): I had hoped that maybe we would
have this suit resolved before the time I retired, but that was a
hope beyond fulfillment. On the research issue as far as
extension was concerned, the judge in Alameda County, Judge
Marsh, has indicated that he does not agree with the allegation,
and he is prepared to rule that that's not an issue. He would be
ruling in favor of the University, on that point. (This is a
trial before the judge; there's no jury involved.)
The plaintiffs on their own dropped the conflict of interest
allegation —
Lage : Do you know why they did that?
Kendrick: They didn't have a case.
Lage: They just couldn't develop anything.
Kendrick: No. They have also dropped the public trust act violation. We
were prepared to go to bat on that one because we thought we'd
win that fairly easily. That leaves just the experiment
station —
Lage: The Hatch Act.
Kendrick: The Hatch Act. Now, the judge has indicated that he feels the
University does not have a process to evaluate proposed research
projects on whether or not they are going to cause an adverse or
180
Kendrick: a beneficial impact on farm labor and small farmers. And, in one
of these conferences that we had with the general counsel's
office, at their suggestion, as a strategy, we agreed to accept
that allegation, accept the judge's ruling. Because, as I said,
we can't prove that we have a process that evaluates each project
on the basis of whether or not there will be a benefit or adverse
effect on agricultural labor and small farmers. And we don't
think we have to. That's not the way you evaluate projects.
There's nothing in the law, in the Hatch Act, that says the
program is developed to aid small farmers, and the judge's
interpretation was that we were supposed to evaluate each
research project on its impact on small family farmers and labor.
Lage: But, not necessarily evaluating impacts on the processing
industry and other industries?
Kendrick: No. It's very specific. But the Hatch Act itself says nothing
about size or ownership of agriculture. It just says develop a
healthy agricultural economy and aid in the full employment.
Well, the judge also is asking the University to provide him
with a proposed process of how we would go about doing this
evaluation. It's obvious that we've lost that issue at this
level, which is a very fundamental issue as far as we are
concerned. And so in the interest of speeding it along and
getting it into the appellate court, we agreed to the
stipulation. And that's where it is.
Lage: Now. when you say "in the interest of speeding it along — ?"
Kendrick: We'll appeal to the District Court of Appeals. Just as soon as
he makes that ruling, the appeal will be filed. We've read the
Hatch Act too.
Lage: How does having this kind of gigantic suit hanging over your head
and over the entire division — how does that affect you?
Kendrick: Well, there was no punitive action. I wasn't going to go to
jail, wasn't going to be fined, or anything like that — it was an
annoyance. I felt that, in the first place, it's a social
argument; it does not belong in courts. When the trial actually
got activated and started in Alameda County with Judge Avakian. I
was down there the first day, and it was a media event. I also
made sure that we were not unilaterally outrepresented by the
critics, that we had some farm people coming from the local
areas. It was a small courtroom, filled with more people than
there was space for. and the media trying to get pictures and
interviews.
Lage: It had a lot of public interest.
181
Kendrick: But the interesting thing is that the plaintiffs read the initial
statement, and it went on, and on, and on, and on. It got to be
past two o'clock, and two-thirty. Well, it was getting past all
the deadlines, and all the media people were picking up their
stuff and they were getting out of there by that time [laughs].
It was really kind of a lost cause. Well, I had an opportunity
to make a few comments, so that we were not devoid of at least
having our difference of opinion expressed. Marjorie Sun from
Science magazine came out to cover that opening trial, and I
spent some time with her. I felt that my viewpoint was fairly
represented by the media; I don't feel that we were roasted
unchallenged.
But the CRLA knows how to use the media very effectively,
even more so than the academic community that I'm associated with
does, and their timing in using the media was also very good. I
think that our public information group needs to tone up a little
bit and play that game professionally and not just react to it.
But the problem, as I say, that I had with the trial, is
that they began to assemble their expert witnesses. One came
from Cornell, and one came from UC Santa Cruz, and one agricul
tural economist who had retired from Missouri and was living in
California. Their testimony was this same kind of theme of
agrarian reform, that the ownership in agriculture was in the
hands of business and business-oriented activities and
enterprises; it was getting bigger and bigger; and the University
was forcing it into bigger units. The University was charged
with paying little attention to the sociological displacements
that were taking place for people engaged in agriculture, and the
exploitation of labor to the gain of the business community.
There really was no truth to the allegations. There
certainly is no conspiracy as far as the University is concerned.
They were attempting to lay the groundwork to prove that we were
using public money for private gain; that we were engaged in
research which we shouldn't pursue; and to demonstrate that large
farm units caused poorer surrounding communities than small farm
units. The witnesses compared agricultural development in the
west side of the San Joaquin Valley with that in the east side
of the San Joaquin Valley, where there is a lot of difference
other than just size of the farms. The west side is made up of
large acreages of primarily cotton and grain. They got
themselves into trouble with selenium and dust and poor
economics, and their community support areas are not very good.
They're younger, for one thing.
The east side is a much more pleasant side of the San
Joaquin Valley to live in. There are older established
communities; there is orchard-type agriculture. They tend to be
smaller units because you don't generally have a thousand acres
182
Kendrick:
Lage :
Kendrick:
of tree fruits and nuts under one ownership. Water availability
is different, and there are just a lot of differences other than
size of the agricultural units.
But the discussions were all sociologically-based
differences of opinion, and it was a little bit like the Bork
hearings. Do you want to legislate from the bench, or do you
want to interpret the existing law? I am an unabashed exponent —
I don't want the judicial branch making law. I'm perfectly
willing to go to Sacramento, to the legislature, and argue and
agonize and go through this whole process, because they're
charged with the responsibility of paying attention to societal
needs. But it does not belong in the court.
Did the tension, the media tension, subside?
It evaporated very quickly,
[laughter]
Lasted twenty- four hours.
Academic Freedom and the Independence of the Regents
Lage: Did the suit have the effect of bringing pressure to bear on you
from the President's Office or from the Regents?
Kendrick: No. Well, the active part of the suit got started in trial stage
at the very end of Saxon's presidency, and most of it has been
taking place under President David Gardner. David is totally
supportive of hanging in there and proving our point. I had no
particular pressure from the Board of Regents, other than from
Regent Vilma Martinez at one point. She was getting a little
noise from some of the plaintiffs pursuing the suit and hoped
that we could reach an amicable compromise and give some
attention to what the complaints were. But there's no room to
compromise on this issue, as far as I'm concerned,
of academic freedom and intrusion.
It's a case
One of the interesting things about this — the constitutional
independence of the Regents goes back almost to the origin of the
University itself, but not quite. It goes back probably to the
1890s. One of the major problems that the Board of Regents faced
back in those 1880s, 1870s. came from the California Grange. The
agricultural interests were really getting in there, and they
were exercising an undue amount of influence, trying to influence
direction, because they felt that they were going to be
disadvantaged in the University if it became a University of
California rather than a college of agriculture, with all its
resources devoted to their needs.
183
Kendrick: And the resulting interference of this aggie group of people
[laughter] resulted in constitutional independence for the
Regents. So here we are 115 years later, on the other side of
the issue, in which the people are trying to influence the
direction and program through the courts. Now, there are ways
to do that, but not by mandating through the courts that we do
specific kinds of things. You ask the legislature to appropriate
money, and you fight it out. The program in sustainable
agriculture is a new program responding to a legislative interest
and a legislative appeal by people who felt that they were being
neglected by the University's agricultural program — people in
organic fanning and nontraditional farming methods.
Lage: So that came in through legislative directives and appropriation?
Kendrick: Yes. So now we have a fairly substantial program centered on the
Davis campus, with a new director, in sustainable agriculture,
serving the new clientele that we haven't served before.
Lage: As we go along, maybe we can talk about some other programs that
have come along. I think it's a good stopping point; do you
agree?
Kendrick: Okay, good.
184
X THE RESEARCH BUDGET FOR THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION
The Fixed Costs of Permanent Academic Staff Salaries
[Date of interview: October 16. 1987] ##
Lage : Today is October 16, 1987. This is the eighth session with James
Kendrick, and today we're going to move into the Agriculture
Experiment Station: administration, special problems, and new
research directions.
Kendrick: Yes. I believe at the last session I talked about modifying the
agricultural advisory committee and broadening its representation
beyond commodity agriculture that had been represented almost
exclusively on the previous committee. That was only the
beginning of trying to broaden the research program of the
experiment station, or at least recognize the fact that there
were other sources who were anxious to be heard from, as well as
expecting some activity from research conducted by members of the
experiment station.
I also had referred to the fact in an earlier session that
the flexibility of funding the experiment station was really not
very great — even though it had a large budget of state-
appropriated funds and represented about 60 percent of the state-
appropriated money for the University's organized research
category.
Lage: And that's a line item, directed to the experiment station?
Kendrick: Yes, it was identified for agriculture. And it has always been
somewhat of a source of envy by other elements of the University.
If there's a hundred million dollar appropriation for the
University's organized research, agriculture gets sixty million
of it. It appears that Jim Kendrick, the vice president, had a
sixty million dollar freestanding research fund to allocate, and
that agriculture was particularly favored in the state appropria
tion over all the other organized research units of the University.
185
Kendrick: There are no other organized research units in the University
that fund as much of the permanent staff as agriculture does.
Lage: Of the University's permanent staff?
Kendrick: Of the University's permanent faculty and staff.
Lage: So that budget pays for part of the faculty salaries of those who
have a dual appointment in a department and in the experiment
station?
Kendrick: That's correct. About 500 academic FTE in the experiment
station, and those 500 academic FTE are experiment station
faculty.
Lage: Could you define FTE again?
Kendrick: Full time equivalent, another budgetary term used to identify
positions of the experiment station.
Most members of the experiment station average about 70
percent FTE in the experiment station- funded portion of their
salary, which is related to the time that they're expected to
spend on the experiment station program. The balance of their
appointment and salary, or 30 percent, comes out of another
budgetary category called instruction and research [I & R], This
is the category that funds the general faculty of the University
of California, and the title series that is associated with it
contains the professorial ranks.
It's that mix of FTE between the experiment station FTE, and
the I & R FTE, where the vice president and the chancellor must
agree to fund when we are allocating a vacant position to a par
ticular department and program. So that process drives a coopera
tive relationship between the President's Office and the chancellor
in deciding how the allocations of resources are to be made.
But that 60 percent of the University's organized research
appropriation is what stands out in the budget. And considering
how many organized research units there are in the total
University system, there isn't much money left to go around those
other units. So what really happens is that these other units
wind up using that state-appropriated funding to fund their core
administrative staff. Anybody who comes into those units to
conduct a research program depends largely on external grants and
contracts for their supporting funding. So what in essence
happens is that the state of California is the granting agency
for agricultural research. Precedent for that goes back in
history, in the fact that the state and the University in
partnership set up a research program for agriculture to serve
agriculture in the state, and it has continued ever since.
186
Lage: Is that an obligation under the land grant college legislation?
Kendrick: Yes. The mandate of the Morrill Act required instruction in
agriculture, mechanic arts, and military tactics to qualify as a
land grant institution. That's why we find some land grant
institutions in the United States still bearing a title like
Texas A and M — Texas Agriculture and Mechanics Institute. That
also, I believe, is the reason why the Mechanics Institute in San
Francisco maintained a spot on the Board of Regents for so many
years, as an ex officio member, because that was a response to
this same mandate that mechanics be a part of the instructional
offering of a land grant institution.
So agriculture was embedded in the formation of the
University of California as a land grant institution.
Legislative Protection for Agricultural Research in the 1967
Reagan Budget
Lage: Prior to your coming to the vice presidency, in 1966
reapportionment of the state legislature affected agriculture's
power in the legislature. How did that affect your
appropriations?
Kendrick: It didn't affect the appropriation policy as much as it affected
the environment in which I found our program received in
Sacramento. Let me not overlook a little incident that I
inherited that was somewhat difficult to deal with, stemming from
activities of the legislature. You're quite perceptive in asking
about the effect of reapportionment of the legislature and the
adoption of the one-person, one-vote representation on
agriculture's influence in the legislature. These actions
changed vastly and forever the kind of legislative influence that
rural California — and rural areas in other states — exerted over
appropriations and programs that were of public interest.
Prior to that change in reapportionment and the one-person,
one-vote edict, the legislature was under the control of rural
California, both in the senate and the assembly. And
agriculture, being as important as it was in the rural community
of California, was an important power to deal with. To the
extent that they voiced opinions about what they thought we ought
to be paying attention to, the University's agricultural division
usually responded, and the appropriations were supplied in due
course to carry those concerns forward.
187
Kendrick: I don't mean to imply that these appropriations and programs were
forced upon the University. Most were conceived and lobbied for
by interested University people. But success in achieving these
appropriations was more certain in the rural-dominated
legislature. Some of the successful programs and special
appropriations for them were pear decline, agricultural
mechanization, and the establishment of the departments of
nematology at both Davis and Riverside.
About the time I came up here, just a year before, was the
inauguration of the Reagan years as governor [1967]. He greeted
the University with a budget cut. Part of the budget cut was due
to trying to get the bankrupt state back in good financial
condition, but I think part of it was due to the general
unhappiness he had with what was going on as far as Vietnam and
the student activities, the Free Speech Movement, and the whole
array of protests that were going on. Reagan, representing the
kind of law and order mentality that he brought into that office,
was anxious to set things in order. That's a whole other story
which will be revealed in other people's oral histories. But it
did result in an action in Sacramento that instituted about an 8
percent budget cut.
Lage: For the entire University?
Kendrick: For the entire University. But what happened as far as
agriculture was concerned was that some of our friends — and I
don't know just where they came from, but I suspect it was some
of the organized commodity groups — prevailed upon the legislative
representatives with whom they were dealing to protect the
organized research appropriation for agriculture. And they had
written into the law that, while the University overall was going
to take an 8 percent reduction, agriculture was not to be cut
more than 3 percent. So the agricultural representatives in the
legislature had protected the program, at the expense of the rest
of the programs in the University, and particularly the other
organized research units.
If I had been on board prior to that happening, I would have
never allowed that differential to exist, because I inherited ill
feelings and ill will within the institution that I didn't need.
If the institution was going to take a reduction, we should have
taken our share. But that was another environment that I had to
deal with in setting subsequent budgets because I was always
reminded that "Yes, in 1967 you were protected, and we had to
make up your difference,"
Lage: The organized research units still had the overall 8 percent
reduction?
188
Kendrick!
Lage:
Kendrick:
The overall 8 percent was still enforced. So then some of the
units less capable of absorbing that kind of reduction had to
take more than 8 percent.
Now, who did you hear from in matters like this?
get these messages?
Where did you
Well, in the President's budget office and other vice presidents
dealing with academic programs. The academic vice president
would remind me from time to time that the organized research
units that reported to him suffered at the expense of protecting
agriculture. And in years even President Saxon condoned
allocating a larger cut into Cooperative Extension than the rest
of the institution was experiencing, and that resulted in another
political maneuver in Sacramento which didn't sustain the
President's recommendation, and the President's Office was forced
to take another look at allocating reductions.
What I'm really describing is the fact that agriculture,
while not in control of the agenda, was still influential enough
in the political process that it could prevent somebody else frcm
doing harmful things to them. So their role changed. Instead of
being proactive, in terms of initiating things, they were being
reactive and played the role of minority representation. Since
this state government operates — particularly in the appropriation
process, the budgetary process — on the basis of line-item veto by
the governor, and the legislature's power to override that veto
requires a two-thirds majority in both houses to do so, in a
sense, agriculture maintained a kind of protective skin, so to
speak, over the whole agricultural program in this state.
Well, sometimes that works to our advantage, and other times
it is a disadvantage. I found my attitude was one of trying to
live with the whole and not trying to exploit my differences with
the rest of the institution. I felt it was important that groups
other than just the agricultural representation go to bat for
agriculture. Otherwise, in due course, we'd go downhill as the
state became increasingly urbanized, and as fewer and fewer units
in agriculture continued to exist. It just seemed to me the
long-term interest in agriculture programs resided in broadening
the program so that it was not just a farming unit service area,
and that there was some value in offering its program to those
consumers and urbanites as much as it did to the organized
agriculture. That was a philosophic point of view that I tried
to bring to bear throughout all of my administration. And I
attempted to work closely with my colleagues in the President's
Office and with the chancellors, to get them to feel some degree
of comfort and some degree of interest in preserving a program of
research that was clearly a public service-oriented kind of
activity.
189
Kendrick: I was reminded of this special favoritism for agriculture by
several of the chancellors at the time, too, particularly at UCLA
and Berkeley, and they didn't like it too well. The Davis and
Riverside chancellors were less condemning of that particular
thing, because they had a special interest in [laughs] not having
to deal with that cut in agricultural research.
Now, let me get back to the research budget for agriculture.
Of the total amount, about 80 percent is associated with regular
faculty and staff salaries. And that is not well understood,
even by members of the budget group in the President's Office.
It was that 80 percent of the budget that was directly allocated
to campuses without even coming through my office which went to
support the salaries of those regular members of the three
colleges that house most of the personnel engaged in experiment
station research. So 80 percent of the budget for agricultural
research was a non-flexible state appropriation.
Lage: You don't have control over it.
Kendrick: No control.
The Field Station System. Tulelake to Imperial Valley;
Another Fixed Cost
Kendrick: Now, the remaining 20 percent of the agricultural research budget
goes out in various ways. There are a number of research units
that are parts of the experiment station. We have to support our
field station system, consisting of nine locations in the state
of California, all the way from Tulelake to the Imperial Valley.
Tulelake is near KLamath Falls, just across the border from
Oregon in the very northeast corner of Siskiyou County. The
Tulelake station is where the ice minus experiment was conducted.
Tulelake was selected because it is a potato growing area where
late spring frosts occur, and the test was conducted on potatoes
to protect them from frost damage.
There are two large range stations, larger than three
thousand acres. One is the Sierra Foothill Range Station. It
was established to study cattle — cattle grazing and all the
problems associated with range-fed cattle. It is located east of
Marysville, in the foothills of the Sierras, near one branch of
the Yuba River.
Then there is a similar range station greater than four
thousand acres, the Hopland Station. It's located in the Coast
Range near Hopland. That was established to study sheep grazing
and all the problems associated with sheep raising. It also was
190
Kendrick: a source of wildland studies, and much information was developed
on that station about deer herds, dealing with deer and their
native environment and how to keep the size of the herds within
reason.
Lage: Did they do any mountain lion studies there?
Kendrick: I think they may have. They did a pretty complete coyote study,
researching the control of coyotes in the process of raising
sheep.
There are three field stations in the San Joaquin Valley,
one called the Kearney Horticultural Field Station, which is our
major field station in the system of nine. Kearney is near
Reedley, and Reedley is close to Parlier, which is the post
office address for the Kearney Field Station. It's about twenty
miles south and a little east of Fresno.
Then there is the West Side Field Station, which is located
at Five Points. It is not close to anything. It is southwest of
Fresno about forty miles, and is out in that West Side
agricultural development which was developed with the completion
of the California water aqueduct. It is devoted largely to the
field crops and cotton, which are characteristic of the
agriculture in that region. The Kearney Horticultural Field
Station, as the name implies, deals with fruits, nuts, vines, as
well as some of the vegetable crops, and other crops that are
characteristic of the east side of the San Joaquin Valley.
And the Lindcove Field Station is a little northeast of
Visalia, and a little southeast of Kearney. It's within twenty-
five or thirty miles of the Kearney station, but it is just at
the beginning of the Sierra foothill area. It's in the area
where citrus was developed as it moved out of southern California
into the San Joaquin Valley. Its primary activity is devoted to
citrus research.
If
We have also a station in the middle of the metropolitan
area of Santa Clara, which at one time was a very intense
agricultural region. It's not a large station, but it is totally
surrounded by urban area. It originally was devoted to deciduous
fruits, and it is called the Deciduous Fruit Field Station. The
deciduous fruits — plums, prunes, and apricots, were once
prominent in that region's agriculture, and so were strawberries.
But work at that station now is predominantly related to
ornamental and urban agriculture.
191
Kendrick: Then we have a field station in Orange County, which is fast
becoming surrounded by urban development. But it was once Irvine
Company property adjacent to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Base.
It was established to provide some breathing room for some of the
horticultural work that was being conducted at UCLA when UCLA
phased out its agricultural program. One of my predecessors, Dan
Aldrich, was given the unhappy assignment of closing down all of
agriculture at UCLA and relocating it at Davis and Riverside.
One person went back to Berkeley.
Lage: So there was a precedent to the threat to close it down at
Berkeley.
Kendrick: Yes. That's not my story — I didn't have to inherit that. I was
involved in the results of that because at the time I was
chairman of the Department of Plant Pathology at Riverside and
UCLA, and we had four people at UCLA in our department. The
department was, however, always managed from Riverside. Our
teaching unit was located at UCLA, where the students were. And
in the course of the period when I was chair, I had to help
negotiate what we were going to do with the positions and the
people at UCLA. In plant pathology, two of the people who were
at UCLA moved to Riverside and became resident members of our
department. A third member retired from the position.
The fourth member of that department did not want to come to
Riverside, and we ultimately negotiated a spot for him in
Berkeley. That was all taking place when I was chair of the
department.
The same thing happened to entomology. They had some people
move to Riverside into the entomology department. There were
also three or four people engaged in ornamental horticulture at
UCLA, all of whom were relocated in the ornamental horticulture
program at Davis. So eventually the program was phased down,
although not completely while I was the chairman of the
department at Riverside, because as a vice president, I recall
there were a few people still at UCLA, an associate director of
the experiment station at UCLA, Sid Cameron, who became a part of
my Agricultural Advisory Council, or Administrative Council. He
was succeeded in that role by Van Stoutemeyer, a horticultural ist.
So there were at least three or four people who were sufficiently
advanced in their careers that moving them just made no human sense.
Lage: Sounds like it's hard to operate without a department to back you
up.
Kendrick: Well, there was a little bit of the teaching program remaining so
they moved into botany and conducted the program. There were, I
think, three or four people left at UCLA to finish out their
careers.
192
Kendrick: I guess you could say that the negotiation of the phaseout of
agriculture at UCLA started under Aldrich, proceeded under
Peterson, and the final dot at the end of the paragraph wasn't
completed until I had a little bit to do with it. I recall that
the negotiations on where some of the supporting resources and
the vacated positions were going to go were conducted by Mack
Dugger, the dean and associate director of the experiment station
at Riverside, and David Saxon. David at the time was the
executive vice chancellor at UCLA, so we had an early
relationship with David before he became president.
Lage: So did we name all the field stations?
Kendrick: No. we've got one more to go. I digressed a little bit because
that Orange Coast Field Station, as I indicated, was selected so
that it could serve the faculty of the experiment station from
Riverside as well as UCLA, an easy run by the automobile from
both places. But it ultimately became a place where activity in
citrus and avocado research were predominant, with a little bit
of ornamental horticulture and turf research also conducted
there. We had an important strawberry breeding program also at
that station.
Lage: Has that been taken over by urbanization also?
Kendrick: Well, it's been quite a while since I've been to that station.
I'm told that there's a lot of urban encroachment. The Irvine
Company is in the land development business as well as
agriculture, but I think their agricultural activity is minimal.
The last — the ninth — field station is in Imperial County.
It's called the Meloland Field Station, in the Imperial Valley.
The proper name is the Imperial Valley Field Station. There's a
little railroad siding there, and I think it's called Meloland.
It is about five miles east of El Centre. It, as one would
expect, is devoted to the kind of crops that are characteristic
of the Imperial Valley. The Imperial Valley is an interior
desert valley that has been developed because of water available
through the Colorado River Compact. There is an aqueduct that
comes from the Colorado River and irrigates the Imperial Valley.
It also is the source of most of the water for the Salton Sea.
Well, that's quite an extensive system of field stations,
but it certainly is not overwhelming. It's not as large as some
of the other states that have field stations. The main
difference is that our University field stations do not conduct
programs on their own. They are managed as facilities for the
regular experiment station personnel located on the campuses, and
for the extension personnel — both specialists and farm advisors —
to conduct their field research work on. We had a few
permanently located research people and some extension people
193
Kendrick: located at Imperial and at Kearney. But for the most part, the
staff located at the field stations were support staff and a
mixture of field station personnel as well as some department-
assigned supporting staff.
Field stations in other states conduct independent research
and extension programs on their own. I like it the way we manage
it because it meant we didn't have a lot of independent programs.
Our field research program was under the management of our
regular faculty and staff.
We got off on this topic because the field station system is
one of the allocations of the 20 percent of the budget remaining
after the 80 percent nonflexible funding that is part of the
experiment station appropriation.
Lage : So field stations were another sort of fixed cost.
Kendrick: They certainly were. It's a fixed cost in the sense that to
achieve any flexibility meant closing down a facility or
discharging people. It is not a source of funds that's available
for annual reallocation, as grant funds usually are.
The Statewide Critical Applied Research [SCAR] Fund
Kendrick: There were about a million dollars worth of these special funds
composed of several special funds such as the previously
mentioned pear decline funds. Ultimately we solved the pear
decline problem, and so the question was, what do you do with
those funds?
Lage: Did the appropriation end, or — ?
Kendrick: No, it was fixed into the budget. All those special
appropriations were part of the general budget. They were
indexed to inflation so, in due course, they had increased
accordingly.
Lage: Once the problem's been solved, isn't there some way to say — ?
Kendrick: Well, what I did was say, "I think it's foolish to identify these
funds as pear decline funds." What we should do is identify them
as pear research funds. As long as there's a problem in pears,
it will get first call on those funds, and if there's no critical
need for pear research, why, as far as I'm concerned, it's fair
game for allocation to other kinds of general problems. I would
try to keep it somewhat related, but I wasn't concerned that it
necessarily go back to pear decline.
194
Kendrick: The pear decline funds had lost their identity with anyone other
than those preparing the budget, and the proponents of the
special appropriations in the legislature had long since moved
on. So there was really no watchdog for them. And since we had
a number of these earmarked original appropriations, what we did
was ultimately combine them into what was called the Statewide
Critical Applied Research Fund [SCAR Fund], which was a grant
fund amounting to about a million dollars. This was helpful
because it meant we had some degree of flexibility to allocate on
short notice to activities that were directed towards a crisis.
We tried to keep the funds strictly within the definition of
critical applied research to contrast it with the long-term basic
research activities that were by and large funded through grants
made by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of
Health, and other federal agencies.
We had more money coming into our program from those kinds
of sources, federal sources, which were the result of the
individual faculty members' own entrepreneurship and
gr ant sman ship, than we had from the USDA formula funds. As a
matter of fact, we had twice as much coming from other federal
agencies as we had from the Hatch funds. We never felt that the
Hatch funds were that significant in determining our program,
which was another reason that I resented the accusations from the
suit of the California Rural Legal Assistance that implied that
because our program was unduly influenced by agribusiness and
private industry, we were misusing Hatch funds. There was no way
to trace exactly how Hatch funds were being used because they
were co-mingled with other programs and with other funding.
Lage: Hatch funds were just sort of a general appropriation?
Kendrick: Hatch funds arrived at the University on a formula basis. And
the formula was derived by a ratio of rural population to urban
population and numbers of farming units. California suffered
from that ratio, that index, because the numbers of farming units
in California were not as great as in many southern states, and
the rural population —
Lage: If there were smaller farms, California would have gotten more
money?
Kendrick: The rural population in relation to urban population [laughs] was
also not something that favored California's distribution of
Hatch money. So our share of Hatch allocations was really not
very large in relation to the value of our agriculture. A number
of us always thought that we ought to place in that index the
value of the product, but we didn't get beyond the talking stages
in that. It's not easy to reallocate a funding source that has
become no standard and so traditional that it has really become
part of your base budget. So you don't take money away from
195
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick:
Lage:
Kendrick:
Kentucky or Tennessee or North Carolina or Florida and reallocate
it to California, which already has got one of the largest
agricultural budgets of any of the land grant institutions in the
states. We stand out like a sore thumb among all states, but we
stand out because the state of California has always taken more
than a modest interest in supporting agriculture, and they have
appropriated accordingly.
Now, where were we?
We've shown how there was not a lot of flexibility in the
program. This is one of the themes you wanted to discuss, how
introduce flexibility into the program.
to
Yes. And this is one of the techniques, combining some of these
specialized funds. Another source of those specialized funds was
the ag mechanization funding. It became a part of the total
Statewide Critical Applied Research Fund.
There was one enlightened appropriation early on in my
tenure supported by Vice President Oswald in spite of the
terrible environment that I was experiencing. It was a
designated appropriation requested through the regular budgetary
process. It was not difficult to convince the State Department
of Finance representatives and the Assembly's Ways and Means
Committee representatives, after they understood the fixed nature
of the total appropriation, that we could improve our ability to
respond quickly, if there was some undesignated funding. So a
modest amount of funding at our request, something like $250,000,
was appropriated, and it ended up in this unrestricted funding
source. I had help from the President's budget office; Loren
Furtado was instrumental in shaping the budget in those years.
He saw the need and was somewhat sympathetic and helped shape the
request and justification.
He was a University employee?
He was from the University budget office. Vice President Oswald
and Loren Furtado were also helpful in my securing $100,000 of
Regents' controlled funds to support agricultural research which
was focused on innovation and change in direction. While these
funds did not fit precisely our SCAR Fund purpose, they were
welcome additions to our flexible funding sources. We continued
to identify them as "Regents' Funds." The amount of allocatable
funds available on an annual basis really was very modest,
however, in relation to the size of the research effort of the
experiment station.
196
Working with the State Department of Finance
Lage: And how about the staff of these legislative committees that you
mentioned? Did you work well with them?
Kendrick: We worked with the Department of Finance, initially, in putting
the budget together. That's the most critical stage of
budgeting, as far as the state portion of our total operating
budget was concerned. The summer and fall of the year is when
the President's Office budget office group works almost daily
with the Department of Finance, going through the budget item by
item, justifying the allocations that the University is
requesting, and providing arguments in support of what we think
we need to run the institution. It's so critical to get items
included in the governor's budget, because if it does not appear
in the governor's budget, it is unlikely to be funded.
Lage: So your first job is with the governor's people.
Kendrick: The first job is with the Department of Finance, to get into the
budget proposal the things that are needed because they, of
course, are charged with the responsibility of putting the
governor's budget together. That doesn't mean that the governor
doesn't have a mind of his own and couldn't ask for things or ask
that things be eliminated. But it is really the Department of
Finance that is critical in putting this together.
Lage: Would this be a time where you could perhaps compare the
different governors' departments of finance and how they were to
work with?
Kendrick: Well, I can, yes. Let me finish the story of budgeting because I
don't know if it's in Harry Wellman's oral history, or if it will
be in dark Kerr's autobiography. The manner in which the
budgeting process is carried forth is unique to California, and
it's due to the fact that there's a line-item veto available to
the governor.
Lage: So if something is added by the legislature that wasn't in the
governor's budget, it's likely to be vetoed.
Kendrick: That's precisely the case. And that's why it's so critical to
have desired items included in the budget as presented to the
legislature by the governor. The legislature doesn't have to
appropriate everything that the governor asks for. Often they
don't. That most often results in us not getting that item
because the governor, while permitted to veto, is not permitted
to add items back that the legislature has eliminated. So the
process after the ' udget is put before the legislature is all
downhill.
197
Lage: I see. It's a defensive action.
Kendrick: It's a defensive action. If the legislature wants special items
funded that they think are important and the governor didn't put
in the budget, unless he (or she, as the case may someday be)
feels that it's important, or is an oversight, or they're able to
convince him otherwise, it will wind up on the cutting room floor
and be vetoed as breaking his or her stated goal for the budget.
And if the legislature doesn't like some of the governor's pet
ideas, or some of the things that are put into it by the
Department of Finance, they can refuse to appropriate money for
them, and so we don't get those items either. So it's a no-win
situation — once the budget is in the hands of legislature, it's
fight for what you've got. And that characterizes a lot of our
testimony before the legislature in support of budgets. We wind
up for the most part supporting the governor's budget, regardless
of party and relationships with the budget.
i
198
XI THE AGRICULTURAL DIVISION AND GOVERNORS REAGAN. BROWN.
AND DEUKMEJIAN
Relationships with the Reagan Administration
Reagan Advisors Earl Coke and Allan Grant
Kendrick: During the Reagan administration, our relationship in agriculture
was pretty good, better than the rest of the University. Part cf
that, and maybe even a major share of that, in my opinion, was
due to the fact that Governor Reagan's agricultural advice came
primarily from two sources: Earl Coke and Allan Grant. Earl
Coke was formerly director of Agricultural Extension for the
University, in the period between B. H. Crocheron and George
Alcorn. So he was the second director of the Agricultural
Extension Service.
ff
Earl was quite revered by California's agriculture,
organized and otherwise, and also knowledgeable about the
University, as a former employee. He started out as an ag
extension specialist in agronomy. He was, at the time that I
moved in to my spot, secretary for California's Agriculture and
Services Agency, and his director of agriculture, in Calif orria's
Department of Agriculture, was Richard Lyng, Dick Lyng, who is
the present United States secretary of agriculture.
Allan Grant was not only president of the California Farm
Bureau Federation, but he was president of the State Board of
Food and Agriculture, then known as the State Board of
Agriculture. Later it changed its name when the department
became the Department of Food and Agriculture. He was also, as
president of the State Board of Agriculture, an ex officio
Regent. So the governor had, as far as he was concerned, two
very strong advocates for agr-'.culture as his close personal
advisors.
With Harry Wellman, at luncheon for
formal presentation of Wellman 's
oral history, January 1977.
Evelyn and Jim Kendrick,
October 1981.
The California State Board of Agriculture, at last meeting with Governor
Ronald Reagan, December, 1975. Left to Right: Jim Kendrick, Al Tisch,
Allan Grant, Governor Reagan, Wes Sawyer, Herb Fleming, Director Bru
Christensen, Emil Mrak, Cordner Gibson.
199
Interpreting the University's Mission to the Ag Staff and
Communi ty
Lage : Allan Grant. I noticed in the editorials in California Farmer.
seemed exceedingly upset with the University in the period of
'68. '69.
Kendrick: Yes. The sources of his unhappiness with the University were the
same sources that caused the unhappiness that the governor
exhibited. These were the perceived seeming lack of resolve to
punish and admonish the confrontations, the strikes, the sit-
downs, and rowdy behavior, in their view, by students who were
opposed to the U.S. policy in the Vietnam engagement.
Lage: Did he carry that over to his attitude towards your division?
Kendrick: No. I had mentioned earlier in one of our sessions that one of
the attitudes I often encountered in Cooperative Extension was a
feeling that they were not a part of the University of
California, particularly those people who were located in offices
in regions of California which were pretty conservative. They
tended to look at the University of California as them, and those
of tis are different, and we aren't sympathetic towards that sort
of thing. I tried to remind them that, rather than criticize the
University of California in its generic sense, to recognize its
comprehensiveness and explain that they were also a part of the
University of California, and anyone who wanted to condemn the
University of California in its totality were in a sense
condemning the agricultural extension program also. I thought
that they ought to stand up and be counted, indicating that the
University was a diverse collection of ideas and people like
them. The noisy ones at the moment were being somewhat rude and
obstreperous. That the University was a collection of
differences; it wasn't a collection of monolithic ideas.
Lage: Was this hard to get across to your own staff?
Kendrick: Absolutely. They couldn't see it. Particularly, I would say,
the Cooperative Extension personnel located in the counties — not
necessarily those that were located on campuses because they were
exposed to the campus environments — but three-fifths of the
Cooperative Extension people were in county-based offices. And
so they were influenced considerably by local community attitudes
and politics. Mot only they, but their clients and constituencies,
would frequently ask and complain about the fact that the University
didn't appear to speak or advocate the same position. "You're
inconsistent. You've got critics in biological control that
condemn the use of pesticides, and you've got those that believe
that pesticide use is the only way to control the pests. Why
don't you make up your mind, so that we understand what's going on?"
200
Kendrick: I would say to those people. "Don't try to hold us to a single,
uniformly expressed point of view. The University has no point
of view. It is a home for intellectual inquiry and expression,
which is not going to be uniform and monolithic. If you've got
an expert on one side of an issue, I can find another expert on
the other side of the issue, and we'll have a lively debate. And
you can make up your mind which one you want to believe. But
don't expect us to do so for you."
Often I would get a plea from some particularly irate
citizen, who seemed to be offended by a particular statement or
point of view, saying, "You better get ahold of that person and
stop them from saying this!" And I'd say, "Not on your life. I
can't stop anybody from saying anything. I can expect them to
justify and provide the basis for what they claim to believe, and
are expressing, but I won't force them to change their opinion.
I'm not running a censorship agency."
Protection for Philosophical Differences in the Faculty Promotion
Process
Lage: Did you find that there were times when faculty in the Experiment
Station who may have expressed unpopular points of view
regarding, say, mechanization, or large farms versus small farms,
or any of these controversial issues, were hindered in their
advancement at the University?
Kendrick: I have no evidence that that ever took place. One of the most
vocal critics of the traditional pest control systems with a
heavy emphasis on chemicals was the late Robert Van den Bcsch, a
colleague of mine at Riverside who moved to Berkeley and was a
member of the Department of Entomology and the Division of
Biological Control. His criticism was often times cynical,
sarcastic, and somewhat barbed. He became a very popular person
to quote in the press. His descriptions were vivid and
appealing, as far as the public media were concerned. But I'm
not aware that Bob ever missed an advancement or a promotion for
those reasons. I vigorously defended his right to express
himself. I didn't happen to agree with him, but he was certainly
at liberty to pursue his academic rights to be a critic. So that
we had a good relationship even though we differed on many issues
that he found time to criticize.
There were others. I think the Biological Control group
felt that they were under siege a good part of the time, and we
tried to organize them a little closer into the Department of
Entomology here at Berkeley. This precipitated a world-wide
letter-writing campaign suggesting that we were doing away with
Biological Control because we didn't like their criticisms and we
201
Kendrick: didn't agree with their programs, which was not the case at all.
We were just trying to tighten up the management a little bit and
get them to become more a part of the physical environment of the
Department of Entomology.
We've kind of digressed here, but this was another one of
those battles that took place during my regime when we were
trying to reorganize the way things were being handled here at
Berkeley. Riverside was on the fringe of that argument because
the biological control people are entomologists, fundamentally.
But they differ about 180 degrees with some of their
entomological colleagues. They believe philosophically that
entomologists who advocate pesticide control of insects are
contaminating the environment, so the biological control
specialists pursue a different tactic in controlling insects and
weeds. And that is promoting biological warfare in a sense, by
pitting one biological entity against another.
So that philosophical difference was the source of a schism
between the two groups that still exists today. They're not
airily brought together in the collegia! environment. The people
in the Division of Biological Control feel that if they were
totally amalgamated and submerged into the Department of
Entomology, which at both Riverside and Davis are large
departments, they would lose the force of their ability to
express themselves in the manner that they do now. It's really a
case of preserving the right, at least the opportunity, to exist
somewhat separately. They felt that a structure of separatism
was exceedingly important to them, in being able to express this
different philosophy.
Lage: Did they win that battle, or were they — ?
Kendrick: Yes. They still are separate.
Lage: It's a separate department, or — ?
Kendrick: A division. It's a subunit of the Department of Entomology at
both Riverside and Berkeley. I continue to believe that they
would be better off being a little more a part of the entomology
department. But I believe that they should be allowed to
preserve themselves as a subunit and express their philosophical
points of view just as strongly as the economic entomologists,
who essentially are identified as the pesticide group.
The urge to kill things with chemicals has passed. I think
we've gotten through that era of pest control. And we're into
the much more enlightened era of developing strategies to control
diseases and pests. But the transition has left a lot of raw
edges.
202
Kendrick: The question you asked about whether these differences of opinion
from the standard opinions were detrimental to the advancement of
those who expressed them, and I have to say that I have no
evidence that they were. I think if we were to ask some of the
people who expressed them, they might suggest otherwise. So I'm
not sure that the evidence is very clear on one side or the other
because advancement and promotion are based upon good scientific
work, and that is somewhat of a subjective analysis by your
peers. There are some who will say, "Well, my peers were down on
me because I've been criticising them all along." It would be
hard to prove or disprove either case, but I think that you could
also find critics of the quality or quantity of the work being
done.
Lage : In the promotion process, don't they go outside of their
immediate department and maybe outside the college to get
opinions? In agricultural economics, for instance, would they go
outside of the immediate Department of Agricultural Economics for
peer review?
Kendrick: Each campus handles their promotion process slightly differently.
but there are certain similar elements that characterize the
University of California as a whole. When you are moving to
tenure, or moving from an associate professorship to the
professorship, or from the higher ranks of the professorship into
the super grades, outside testimony is sought. The outside
testimony, primarily, is from people in other institutions or
other campuses, who are familiar enough with the work of the
candidate that they can interpret the quality and the fundamental
nature of the contributions. So that opinions are sought from
people who have no axes to grind. They may not even know the
individual, but because they happen to be working in the same
field, they may know the candidate's work.
When it comes to putting ad-hoc review committees together,
you are not confined to members of your own department. You may
have no more than one representative from your department, or you
might have two. on a five-person committee. And they even go
outside the colleges. You're at liberty to cover the campus. It
is likely here at Berkeley that biologists from one life sciences
area, in zoology or botany, would find themselves on committees
evaluating plant pathologists. If they happened to be plant
physiologically oriented, or biochemistry oriented, they might
find people from biochemistry serving on the committee of someone
who is engaged in the biochemistry of reactions, or viruses, or
what-have-you. And then when you get to the budget committee,
that next level that is placed there to iron out differences or
biases, you're lucky to have anybody from agriculture on that
committee on the Berkeley campus. There have been
representatives from time to time, but it's a smal?. personnel
203
Kendrick: committee. The closest you're apt to get is someone from
biology, or someone from social science who would take care of
the economists. So the system is established to eliminate br'.as.
Lage : It should offer some protection, although I'm sure there are
subtle ways bias can be expressed.
Kendrick: Well, it's the way letters are written, initially. The
department chair plays a very important part in assembling all
that information. The first action that takes place relative to
an advancement is a vote of the tenured members of the faculty in
all cases. In some cases, they include more than just tenured
members in that decision. That's a campus option; it depends on
how broadly they consult. If it's not a vote, at least it's an
attempt to gain some consensus of whether or not the colleagues
in the department feel that the candidate is qualified for the
next step. If all the colleagues in the department have an
opinion different from the chair, the chair must record that
difference, and then that's the beginning of another problem.
Supportive Oversight during Reagan Governorship
Lage: So that took us off our original topic, but I think that I wanted
to get to that at some point. We were talking about the
differences between the different governors.
Kendrick: The fact that Allan Grant, the Regent, and Earl Coke, the
secretary in the cabinet, were both strong agriculture-oriented
officials, placed the agriculture program in the University in
the unique position of having oversight by supporters. They were
quick to act and to comment when they felt that the budgetary
process was being disadvantaged as far as agriculture was
concerned.
So I kind of "tiptoed through the tulips" in this
relationship. I was pleased to have it, but I was also mindful
of the fact that I was having to deal with that special
protection that I inherited when the budget cut was allocated to
the University in 1967 and agriculture was protected to the
extent of that three percent cut overall. After Governor
Reagan's initial unhappiness with the institution toward its
seemingly mishandling or not handling protests, our budget for
the total University was really treated very well. Governor
Reagan ceased to have much direct involvement in University
affairs. That didn't mean that some of his appointees didn't
exercise considerable influence, including Alex Sheriffs, who was
his educational advisor.
204
Kendrick: At one point Verne Orr was the director of finance; he was a
pretty tight-fisted director of finance. Cap Weinberger was the
director of finance at one point. That's where he got his
reputation of Cap the Knife, because he was not very generous.
You really had to fight for what you thought you needed during
those years when Charlie Hitch was president.
Confrontational Regents' Meetings, with Campus Administrators
on the Defensive
Kendrick: There was always a lot of tension on the Board of Regents between
the Reagan appointees and those who had been appointed by the
senior Governor Brown. Very different points of view, and there
was still the residue of campus confrontations, teach-ins, and
sit-ins, and one thing or another. It was during those periods
that People's Park took place — this was in the early seventies —
and we also had the National Guard in the streets some of this
time. Regents' meetings became a target of protest, as far as
students and eager faculty were concerned.
We had a particularly frightening Regents' meeting very
early in my vice presidency in '68 or '69 — probably the fall of
•68 — at UCLA, in which the students surrounded the University
dub where the meeting was being held. They broke in, or tried
to break in, storming the place with rocks and breaking large
glass windows. It was a hair-raising experience, bordering on a
riot. The Regents had a little trouble getting out of the
meeting when it was over.
That meeting was followed soon by another hair-raising
Regents' meeting on the Santa Cruz campus, in which another
student-led protest resulted in their infiltration of the meeting
room where shouting and confrontational tactics took place.
There was a lot of anger expressed toward the governor and his
representatives. And so when they would appear at Regents'
meetings, a lot of that anger was vented in this confrontational
setting. That really caused the Regents to decide that they
would not meet on campuses any more. Up until that time, they
had been moving from campus to campus to hold their meetings.
So for the remaining period of President Hitch's presidency
and most of the period of President Saxon's, the Regents'
meetings were held — one north, one south — in the Extension
Centers. Ultimately, the Regents got so fed up with the
Extension Center in downtown Los Angeles, which was nothing more
than a made-over Safeway store, that they moved to the L.A.
205
Kendrick: Convention Center. That was a little bit like holding it, well,
in a convention center. That was where this famous meeting on
the ag mechanization issue was held.
But then Chancellor Young finally persuaded the Regents that
they could have a well-controlled meeting at the West Center,
which was the alumni center on the UCLA campus. And every time
they went south subsequently, we met on the UCLA campus — which
was not devoid of confrontations, but there seemed to be a little
better control of things, and the volatility of the issues were
less — were more localized. Vietnam and Free Speech were issues
of the past. But Regents' meetings are still focal points for
protest.
Well, Governor Reagan and his appointed Regents, after
causing the dismissal of Clark Kerr, expressed a certain amount
of unhappiness with what he thought was mishandling of student
unrest by Chancellor [Roger] Heyns. Roger was a master
chancellor, but nearly every meeting he had to explain something
that had happened the previous month —
Lage: Did he handle the explanations well?
Kendrick: He was a master at that. Roger was one of my favorite people.*
And he just wore out, having to endure that kind of inquisition,
it seemed to me. The topic of controversy could be a
publication, an obscene publication, and he had to explain why
that was a freedom that was allowed. Almost any subject that
some Regent took issue with, he would be called to the table to
explain what he was going to do about it, or what he had done
about it, or why he didn't do something about it.
It was also the period when Chancellor Chuck Young had
agreed that Angela Davis could be hired as a faculty person, and
he went through a period of trying to explain why someone who
advocated communist rule would be welcomed to the University
faculty. It was also the period when Bill McGill was chancellor
at San Diego.
f*
He had a faculty member, overage, 'whose appointment was
coming up for renewal, and that faculty person's name was
Marcuse.
* See Roger W. Heyns, Berkeley Chancellor, 1965-1971; The
University in a Turbulent Society, Regional Oral History Office,
The Bancroft Library, 1987.
206
Lage: Herbert Marcuse.
Kendrick: And our Regents — I don't mean all of them, but certainly Allan
Grant represented this point of view very strongly — couldn't
understand why the University could possibly expose students to
that point of view. Marcuse was a Marxist, an advocate of that
political system. In the face of the confrontations and the
student riots, the chancellors at UCLA and Berkeley and San Diego
seemed to condone this kind of nontraditional and nondemccratic
thinking. It was all pretty hard for the Regents to swallow.
And, of course, Clark Kerr was identified with opening up the
campuses to the appearances of Communists and with free speech.
That was all very impressionable, and as one of those who
was part of the President's staff and trying to help poor Charlie
keep the house in order, it was no time for me to make special
pleadings for special considerations for agriculture. [laughs]
Lage: Were you put in the position of trying to defend things, say, to
Allan Grant?
Kendrick: I did all I could because in May of 1968 I became a member of the
State Board of Agriculture, and served in that capacity for about
sixteen years. So I had more than a casual relationship with
Allan. Over the course of our relationship, we became close
friends, and I think he was a strong supporter of what I was
trying to do. And it gave me an opportunity to try and help him
think through what a university really stood for. Well, I don't
think I completely sold him on the notion that we were not going
downhill and that we were applying sanctions to the offenders.
But Roger was applying as many sanctions as he could get away
with. He was a tougher administrator than people have given him
credit for.
President Hayakawa of San Francisco State University was
getting all the publicity for yanking off the loudspeaker when
someone was advocating some position of protest. That's the main
thing he ever did, but that was a dramatic event with lots of
media coverage. Roger was developing all kinds of rules,
regulations, policies, and sanctions, and making them stick. So
he did ten times what Hayakawa did to try to bring order back to
the campus. But it was tough for the Regents to see because
every time he moved one step ahead, it seems like he got pushed
two steps backwards.
207
The Jerry Brown-David Saxon Era
Warfare between the Governor and the Regents
Kendrick: Then came Jerry Brown, and there was kind of a sigh of relief
because we expected him to be supportive. Charlie Hitch felt
that eight years of Reagan was about all he could stand as the
chief administrator of the University of California, and he was
not looking forward to going through all this with another
governor. At the end of Charlie's presidency, the University did
not have good relationships in Sacramento.
Lage: In the Brown administration?
Kendrick: No. At the end of the Reagan administration. Even though the
budgets didn't suffer a lot, there was in the state government
still a lot of residual suspicion and resentment, I think, of the
University of California. Particularly in the legislature. Bear
in mind [Assemblyman] John Vasconcellos as a constant in all of
this.
Lage: Yes, but he would have been a particular burr in the side of
agriculture programs, or was it of the entire University?
Kendrick: Yes. He got his burr in the agricultural program over with
early. [laughter] I had my bruises, but I think we got to the
point with John where he recognized that we were on different
wavelengths, and I think we respected our differences. I didn't
convince him, and he certainly didn't convince me. In those
early years, he tended to be vindictive, I thought. That's my
judgment. He kind of had it in for us, in the sense that he felt
that agribusiness had profited long enough. They developed
machines; they were not sensitive to environmental quality or to
the farm workers. But John's fundamental interest is educational
quality, and he's been riding that hobbyhorse ever since. So as
far as targeting agriculture for criticism, I think that's
passed. If a particular abusive action happened to take place,
he would be quick to restore his anger and concern, but I think
that's not likely to happen.
Along came Jerry Brown as governor, and somewhat of a sigh
of relief went through the University. They felt that here was
one of our alumni as governor, a person of clear intellectual
stature who was capable of understanding the intricacies of the
University. We thought he understood what a university was all
about. We felt that at last we have somebody now whom we can
talk with.
208
Kendrick: We were quickly disillusioned. And of course, the Jerry Brown
era was the Saxon era.
Lage : So Saxon came in as President of the University just about the
same time?
Kendrick: Just about the same time. David took it upon himself to try and
repair some of the ill feeling that existed between Sacramento
and the University and tried to work as best he could with the
governor. What started us on this interpretation today was the
budgetary process. We got down to a pretty standard way of
putting the budget together, as far as the Reagan administration
was concerned, and in due course the budget really didn't suffer
a lot, even though he had this feeling of unhappiness with the
way we were doing things. But after those early years of cuts,
Reagan's unhappiness didn't come out in any harmful way as far as
the budget was concerned. Faculty salaries suffered; they were
not very sympathetic there. But we didn't know what we were in
for.
Governor Jerry Brown surprised a lot of us because he then
let his arrogance and cynicism show. The first adverse session,
and one that was crucial as far as I was concerned, was a meeting
that the Regents held in the Lawrence Hall of Science. It wasn't
a very good environment for a Regents' meeting, but it was held
up there on the hill. It was a meeting at which Chet McCorkle,
who was then the senior vice president, was to present to the
Regents the result of a two or three-year effort to develop a
master academic plan for the institution. It consisted of a
collection of nine to twelve individual academic plans and an
overall master plan. My group had contributed to this, by
writing an overview of where agriculture was going.
The entire document must have weighed twenty-five or thirty
pounds. It was nine to twelve documents, and when they stacked
them up on top of one another the stack was at least a foot high
or higher. Chet had them with him at the Regents' meeting, and
he was really quite proud of the fact that they had finally
worked this academic plan through the system. There was
everything in it from A to Zilch and back again. The governor
took the microphone, and said he was totally unimpressed. What
the University was trying to do was what he called the squid
process, and the squid process, he said, was to obscure things
with ink. [laughter]
Lage: That's not too funny, after you've developed the plan.
Kendrick: So it was kind of a personal defeat for Chet, and a bit of a slap
in the face as far as what had become a standard format for doing
business. The mistake, if any mistake was made, was to take a
big document that was a foot high and composed of nine to twelve
209
Kendrick: sections, and plunk them down on the table at the meeting of the
Board of Regents. I can assure you nobody — nobody — just
absolutely nobody is going to read that much material. What was
really needed was a concise, executive summary, with an
explanation that if any Regent really was all that interested in
the details, we would make arrangements for that Regent to see
the detailed document. But anyway, that wasn't done.
Well, that kind of summarized the warfare that the governor
had with the Regents and the University. He was totally
unsympathetic with the Reagan-appointed Regents. He interpreted
Regents' meetings as nothing more than a corporate board of
directors' business meeting, which involved talking almost
exclusively about financial management and spent scant time on
intellectual and educational policy matters. He felt that the
established Regents were all mechanistic and representatives of
big business, agribusiness, and traditional institutional
structures.
Lage : Did he express all this?
Kendrick: In a way, he would. Not the way I've described it. He was very
candid and blunt in his criticism of the Regents, in telling them
that they spent far too much time on the appearance of buildings.
What did that matter? The fundamental issue that a board such as
this ought to be talking about was educational philosophy. And
he set about appointing some members to the board who represented
really non- traditional points of view, so that the character of
the Board of Regents changed materially with appointees not
necessarily sympathetic towards the kinds of programs that I was
administering. They didn't understand them necessarily, but they
held the point of view that agriculture had been favored for
seventy-five or a hundred years, and it was about time to
reallocate some of that favoritism to other bypassed segments of
society.
Jerry Brown's idea of a good Regents' meeting would be one
that would spend an hour discussing educational philosophy or the
deficiencies that undergraduate education was providing its
students. His criticism wasn't all wrong, but the manner in
which he addressed them was not complimentary to his colleagues.
He didn't give them much credit for the fact that they were
interested in managing effectively a multibillion dollar
corporation. While [Regent] Ed [ward W.] Carter was always
polite, and Jerry Brown was always polite in his dealing with Ed
Carter, they certainly didn't come to life with the same point of
view. The interesting thing is that Jerry Brown reappointed Ed
Carter to an unexpired term, to extend his tenure on the board
longer than almost anybody else who had served. So he was not
alienated by Ed Carter, but he certainly was by Regents Bill
210
Kendrick: Wilson, or William French Smith, or Verne Orr. and some of the
other Reagan appointees. He was always on the opposite side of
issues with Regents Dean Watkins and Glenn Campbell.
So there were a lot of opportunities for conf rontationism
between Jerry Brown and the Regents. And Jerry wound up
attending more meetings than Reagan did. He would usually bring
an agenda item that he was interested in pursuing. I'll have to
review some of the names of the Regents that he appointed.
Lage: One was Gregory Bateson.
Kendrick: Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's former husband. He was an
appointee by Brown who almost belied rationality. Gregory
Bateson would take off on a discussion of something that
absolutely nobody in the room could understand. He would launch
on a discussion for fifteen or twenty minutes, and there wasn't
anybody who would have a rejoinder or anything to say because it
was so abstract. [laughs] It bore no relationship to reality.
What he was really talking about was some sort of intellectual
pursuit that was associated with a University exercise, or could
appropriately be incorporated into a University environment. But
it certainly was beyond most of the board to grapple with because
he was not able to put it in to a contemporary situation.
But Jerry Brown could engage in that kind of discussion.
The more we dealt with him, the more we saw that his concept of
what Regents ought to be was a collection of people capable of
engaging in seminars and philosophical discussions of the role of
the University in contemporary society. During both of his terms
as governor, he continued to express this point of view, although
it certainly became considerably less anti-business as he became
reconciled to the fact that healthy economic growth in the state
of California was vital to the welfare and activities of the
state, and so he became a bit less critical of that kind of
representation on the Board of Regents. We had some budget
problems with him.
Brown and the Budget
Lage: Now, how did that attitude get translated in your confrontations
or cooperation with the Department of Finance?
Kendrick: Well, the Department of Finance, as far as Brown was concerned —
I'm trying to think of who his directors were. We continued to
work with kind of the traditional civil servants who come along
with the Department of Finance. Roy M. Bell was Department of
Finance director, and at one point, Mary Ann Graves was director.
211
Kendrick: Saxon's relationship with Brown ultimately deteriorated. David
really didn't have a lot of tolerance for the kind of
intellectualism that Brown wanted to talk about, when David was
really suffering because faculty salaries were not being
adequately increased and money to run the place was tough to come
by. Renewing the contracts to manage the weapons laboratories
was coming up, and Brown wasn't very helpful — wasn't helpful at
all — in trying to sustain those kinds of contracts. There were a
lot of bread-and-butter issues as far as the University was
concerned that the Regents had to contend with, but Jerry seemed
to be saying, "So what? The place will handle itself."
While he was correct in the fact that the Regents needed to
be concerned about educational policy and the quality of
undergraduate education, and the issues of admission policies,
and demographic changes, and affirmative action, he ignored the
primary need of providing an adequate budget to support all of
the activities of the University. He tended to dismiss, we felt
too easily, the kind of bread-and-butter issues that had some
relationship to dollars and cents, and physical facilities
maintenance and construction.
It was during this period that Jerry conceived of the nutty
idea of giving everybody a sixty dollar per month raise, or
something like that. So a full professor got a sixty dollar
raise, and a custodian got a sixty dollar raise, and the
percentage there upset the whole salary system, particularly
because we operate the salary augmentation system on the
percentage basis. It took years to recover from that kind of
action — but his explanation was, well, the lower-paid people need
the money more than the higher-paid people, and sixty dollars
means a lot to them and doesn't mean a lot to those other people.
Sixty dollars sticks in my memory somewhere, but I don't know if
that was what it was or not. But it characterized his cynicism
about the University. I think his Jesuit training influenced his
spartanism. In his commentary about salaries of administrators,
he was totally unsympathetic towards the allocation of sufficient
remunerative salary as far as the administration was concerned.
He would not recognize that you're in a competitive society
with managers, with external private enterprise as well as in
other higher education institutions. You can't just get anybody
to be a president or a vice president, you have to have people
who are qualified and experienced in those areas, and you set
your salaries on the basis of what other top quality institutions
are paying for positions with similar kinds of responsibility.
So the competition was not necessarily with the manager of a
bridge district or something, it's with a manager with comparable
responsibility in a comparable institution.
212
Kendrick: He would counter that argument by saying. "Well, there's a
certain value to psychic income," that not many people are
favored with the opportunity to serve in a capacity that makes a
difference. And therefore, as compensation in lieu of money, you
ought to be satisfied with the fact that there's a lot of psychic
income associated with being in these responsible positions.
Well, psychic income doesn't buy food for the kids, or put them
through school or what have you. So, there was not a lot of good
feeling in the course of the two terms of Governor Jerry Brown.
Extension's Budget Cuts Restored by the University
Kendrick: As far as agriculture was concerned, I had some problems. I
think we had another cut that wasn't particularly aimed at
agriculture, but it was a University-wide reduction. In this
instance, I was able to prevail and suggest that we were gcir.g to
take our fair share.
During one of these reductions that the University was going
to take — and I think it was related to that early favored
position; even though the people involved were different, the
memory lingers on — Cooperative Extension was targeted for about
an 8 percent cut. The University had been assigned something on
the order of about a 6 percent or 5 percent cut.
Lage : That was by the governor for the University budget?
Kendrick: That was in the governor's budget. It was not a vindictive cut,
it was just a shortfall in revenues, and all state agencies were
having to dig deeply in their pockets. There was one action
promoted by Governor Brown which did not give the faculty any
salary relief, no range adjustments. That was applied somewhat
to punish the faculty and their "arrogance." And we ate it. But
this was a revenue shortfall action, and I don't recall
particularly what year it was.
But Saxon and the budget office people decided that
Cooperative Extension was low in priority, below some of the
other areas that they wanted to fund. So they decided to assign
a greater percentage cut to extension than they did the total
University's budget. Now, that didn't set very well with the
agricultural interests, and I had somewhat of a problem to
contain that unhappiness internally, in extension. I really
didn't want to be associated with bringing about a strong politi
cal action in the legislature to counter the President's action.
Lage: Because extension had the local connections to gather the
political forces in the counties?
213
Kendrick: That's true. You can play that political maneuvering once in &
while, but you really ought to play it when it really counts.
And since it wasn't going to amount to a lot of dollars and
cents, we were sort of waiting and seeing. We were not silent
about it, but to my knowledge we took no active efforts to stir
up the crowd about that differential. I advised the President
against his plan when he suggested to me that he was going to cut
the extension budget like this. I said, "You are the author of
how you are going to allocate your funds, but I would caution you
against it because that particular unit has a strong political
base. It could be somewhat embarrassing to you in due course."
I*
David listened attentively to my comments, and he said,
well, he'd think about it. But he finally proposed to take this
reduction differentially. I'd also indicated to the President
that what he was advocating was a perfectly legitimate budgeting
technique, that I would agree that cutting some programs more
than others made good sense because if you're taking a budget
reduction and you just nip everybody, you have some programs
which can't handle a little reduction, and these suffer
excessively while the larger units could probably absorb them in
due course without having a major program problem. But that
nevertheless, his suggesting that Cooperative Extension take the
larger share of this cut was going to cause some problems
politically. And sure enough, it did.
As I said, we weren't silent about what effects the cut
would have because we have a constituency who read the papers and
know that we have to deal with budget reductions. There's also
an agricultural lobby in Sacramento that follows very diligently
all agricultural actions, and we had the University's
Governmental Relations Office in Sacramento, and they followed
constantly issues that affect us, particularly the budget. So it
was no secret that this was going to happen.
What really was at stake here was that the overall
reduction, money reduction, was for the University, and we were
told, "You can take it where you want to." But then the
legislature wanted to know where we were going to take the cut,
because if we were to take it out of the affirmative action, that
exercises a number of the people. If we were to take it out of
another program, that exercises another group of people. If you
take it out of agriculture, that exercises another group of
people.
So when it came time to appear before the Senate Finance
Subcommittee one morning, public service funds, of which
Cooperative Extension is the major share of that particular
budget item, was the topic of the review. Senator [Kenneth L.]
214
Kendrick: Maddy from Fresno and Senator [Walter W.] Stiern from Kern
County, and Senator [Nicholas C.] Petris from Oakland were the
three members of the subcommittee. The main testifier from the
University was Bill Frazer, who was the academic vice president.
This was in the latter part of the Saxon era.
We came to this topic, and Senator Maddy said, "What about
this allocation of 8 percent reduction to Cooperative Extension?"
I was in the witness chair, and I said. "Senator, this was not my
recommendation. I think you ought to listen to another
representative who has overall responsibility for the academic
program of the institution. And since this was counter to my
recommendation. I think you should listen to his justification
for it." Bill took the chair, and he did about as well as he
could, explaining that good budgetary practices dictated the fact
that you make differential allocations of cuts rather than nip
around the edges. He made good logical sense. I'll condense a
good deal of conversation into one sentence: The senator
ultimately said, "Well, you may have the logic on your side, but
I've got the votes on mine." [laughter] "I suggest you restore
that cut so that it's equalized with the rest of the
institution," and that's the way it worked out. We didn't have
any organized campaign, but it left a lot of ill feelings in the
institution.
The Budget as a Political Document
Kendrick: It left a lot of ill feelings within Cooperative Extension
against the president. He really didn't need to do that. The
amount of dollars they were going to achieve in that area were
minimal, in my judgment, and the political price that he paid was
somewhat of an embarrassment, to be told that you may have your
priorities, but I've got mine. And mine are going to prevail
because I'm voting on your budget.
This kind of reinforced within Cooperative Extension and its
leadership a feeling that the president really didn't care about
Cooperative Extension, that it was being punished for all the
personnel troubles arising out of Cooperative Extension, relative
to affirmative action and alleged discrimination in handling
personnel problems by its management. And it reinforced the
suspicion — without any good justified explanation that the
President was taking it out on Cooperative Extension — without
really caring whether personnel deficiencies in management were
there or not.
Lage : Did you fee1, that it was a punishment for this type of thing too,
or just purely a budgetary decision?
215
Kendrick: I don't think it was a punishment reaction by Saxon. I don't
think that he felt that it was as important as faculty salaries,
or as important as some of the more critical campus-based
programs, and therefore it was lower in the priority of things to
be concerned about. And therefore it could stand a higher
reduction in its base budget than something more important, in
his point of view.
But the thing that David overlooked, and was never in my
judgment completely in tune with, were the political forces at
work in the state. The budget is a political document, and it's
no accident that when David Gardner became president, he combined
the budget responsibilities with the University Relations Office.
Because he said, "Once that budget is put together, you get it
funded by the political process, and not by any logic." I
quickly learned in my vice presidency that logic is the lifeblood
of the academic decision-making process, but once you leave that
environment, you've got to be pretty doggone political. And if
you want your viewpoint to prevail, you have to convince people
who are not trained like you, who have voting responsibilities
and public representation responsibilities, that what you have to
say is important. They want to know how many people out there
also think it is important.
To illustrate the political process at work in one of my
requests, I'll tell you exactly how the IPM [Integrated Pest
Management] program was funded in a very interesting way. It
took place in about a minute, minute-and-a-half, conversation
with the state director of food and agriculture, Rich Rominger,
Jim Kendrick and Governor Jerry Brown, at a meeting in San Diego
where Jerry Brown was the principal speaker. Rich and I went up
to the speaker's table just to say hello and get this last word
in, because he was about ready to sign off on his budget. He
asked Rich if this was an important program to him, and Rich
said, "Absolutely. Without this program, we won't be able to
regulate these pesticides." The governor replied, "Okay."
Lage : Had you done some work with Rich before?
Kendrick: Absolutely, we'd done much work with Rich and many others!
[laughter]
Lage: Well, let's talk about that in more detail next time.
Kendrick: We can do that. But what I'm saying is that despite the fact
that the University was having all kinds of problems with
Governor Jerry Brown and his approach to budgeting, I again felt
that we did reasonably well in agriculture — except for the fact
that when the institution suffers, agriculture suffers also
because our faculty package is the same as everybody else's.
When salaries aren't increased or kept pace with competitive
216
Kendrick: institutions, then our budget also suffers because that large
amount of money that comes to support people's activities is a
part of that overall budget. And then it gets segregated every
year from the University's total budget, so it shows that the
Agricultural Experiment Station has had a budget increase, if
faculty and staff salaries have been increased. But usually it
was a salary range adjustment and an indexed increase for cost of
living resulting in more dollars than we had the previous year.
But it didn't result in one dime for a new program.
During most of the latter part of the Reagan administration,
and after Dick Lyng went to Washington, D.C.. Jerry Fielder was
made director the Department of Food and Agriculture. He lost
his life in an airplane accident. Following this tragic event, a
member of the Board of Food and Agriculture, and a colleague of
mine, Bru [C. Brunei] Christensen, became the director of Food
and Agriculture. Bru was a strong advocate for agriculture and
appreciated the University's role in serving California's
agriculture. So I felt that if I really needed political support
in dealing with the legislature or with the executive branch, I
had a receptive opportunity to do so. The legislature itself was
where I was experiencing a lot of problems, but they were largely
philosophical problems; they didn't result in budgetary
adj ustments.
Brown's Major Agricultural Appointments:
Rich Rominger
Tim Wallace, Rose Bird,
Kendrick: During the Jerry Brown administration, I started with Rose Bird
as the secretary of the Agriculture and Services Agency, and Tim
Wallace, who was on our staff when he accepted an appointment as
director of the Department of Food and Agriculture. Tim was an
extension economist, who went on leave from the University to
accept the appointment as director.
The established agricultural units of the state ultimately
became disenchanted with Tim. Probably what caused the
disenchantment more than anything was his strong advocacy for
consumer representation on marketing boards. There is a state
statute which the Department of Food and Agriculture administers
that authorizes the establishment of commodity marketing order
boards. Marketing order boards are producer-dominated boards
which, through a process of membership approval, tax themselves
for promotional sales activities and in many instances support
research programs. It's somewhat complicated to form a marketing
order board. For approval to establish a marketing order board
for a specific commodity, a specified percentage of the acreage's
ownership must vote favorably on its formation. The list of who
217
Kendrick: is eligible to vote is assembled by the Department of Food and
Agriculture. But once it's approved, then all members of the
commodity-producing group belong and must tax themselves on some
production unit basis and contribute to the marketing order fund
for that commodity. The fund is then allocated to activities on
the basis of recommendations from the board composed of the
grower members of the commodity marketing order.
Well, the authorizing statute also states that the consumer
shall be represented on the marketing order boards. Up until
this time the consumer was never really represented because
agriculture just didn't want to be bothered with "outsiders"
commenting on how boards should administer these funds equally
since the origin of the funds came from the growers themselves
and was not composed of the general tax fund. The prevailing
attitude was, "It's our money, we ought to be able to allocate it
the way we want to."
Tim wanted to interpret the law more strictly than his
predecessors and get consumers represented on the boards — there
must have been thirty or forty active boards. He began placing
consumers on the boards, and that angered the traditional
members. They generally responded with dismay and asked, "Why
are you doing this? It's our money." Tim countered with a legal
interpretation from the attorney general's office that it was not
their money because once the boards use the policing power of the
state to tax individuals, that money becomes public money. It's
not solely growers' money anymore; it becomes public funds
administered by public agencies of government.
Well, you can imagine that that just didn't swallow very
well as far as organized agriculture was concerned. Some boards
voted to disband: the Wine Institute, for instance, wasn't going
to put up with any of that stuff, so they just disbanded their
marketing board. There were some others that were equally
unhappy. Ultimately because of this and a number of other
actions, Tim was persuaded that he had lost the confidence of
organized agriculture, and he'd be happier returning to the
University. Which he did. I've simplified a more complex
problem including Tim's relationship with Secretary Bird, which
led to his resignation as director, but the marketing order issue
was a major factor in agriculture's disenchantment with him as
the director.
Rose Bird spent a good deal of her early activities getting
the Agricultural Labor Relations Act designed and enacted. It was
a time of uneasy truce with agriculture. Lionel Steinberg, I
think, was the president of the State Board of Food and
Agriculture, and by this time that ex officio spot on the Board
of Regents was gone. Lionel was from Indio, in the Coachella
Valley. He was a good Democrat and had previously served on the
218
Kendrick: Board of Agriculture. He also was a nontraditional
agriculturalist as far as his farming colleagues were concerned
because he had a certain amount of sympathy towards organized
labor. He tried to make it work and tried to be sympathetic
toward it. So he had one of the earliest contracts with the
United Farm Workers. Cesar Chavez's union.
Lage: He was appointed by Brown, you said?
Kendrick: Yes. Jerry Brown. The president of the State Board of Food and
Agriculture is appointed annually. They are often reappointed.
but it's not a multi-year term like the other members of the
board.
There were also other members of the Board of Food and
Agriculture who saw that farm labor unrest was a losing
proposition. It was something that everybody wished would cease
and desist. So when the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was
working its way through the legislature, agriculture, on the
basis of the governor's promise that this Agricultural Labor
Relations Board would bring peace to the fields and mediate the
differences, backed off and in a sense said, "Well, we won't
oppose it." So it was enacted. And then Governor Brown
proceeded to appoint four strong advocates for the United Farm
Workers to a five-member board. Agriculture felt that the
governor had really done them in, sold them down the river. And
they had absolutely no sympathy for Jerry Brown from then on in.
They ceased to trust him to do a thing on their behalf. I
believe most farmers attribute that lack of trust to that one
act. Rose Bird was also tarred with that same brush. They, the
farmers, felt betrayed.
Lage: Did they feel that she had a role in the appointments, or that
she had misled them in promising something from the board that
didn' t occur?
Kendrick: Well, I think both. They knew that she was Jerry's principal
agricultural advisor, and when several union sympathizers were
appointed members of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and
the executive secretary, who had a lot of influence, came right
out of organized labor's units, they had strong evidence of that
betrayal. And then in order to assemble the work force to get
the Labor Relations Act implemented, they recruited staff from
among organized labor people. So as far as agriculture was
concerned, what they found themselves saddled with was a state-
supported labor organization, an advocacy group, not an
independent arbitration unit that would listen to both sides of
an issue and make a judicial judgment.
219
Kendrick: So that was not only tough to handle, but it placed agriculture
pretty much at war with the Brown administration. The Department
of Food and Agriculture's successor to Tim Wallace was Rich
Rominger, who was also at that time a member of the Board of Food
and Agriculture, a farmer from Winters who was a longtime
personal friend of mine. We had a close and supportive
relationship. So during all of the hullaballoo that existed as
far as organized agriculture and the governor was concerned, I
had a way to get to the governor and his staff, through Rich, who
although not an assertive director, at least had the confidence
of the governor, and the governor listened to him for
agricultural advice.
Lage : Did he have a nontraditional approach in terms of agriculture?
Kendrick: Sort of. But he's a hardworking farmer near Winters, and he has
to make ends meet. Rich's value in that role was that he was
willing to listen to criticism, willing to acknowledge some past
practices, such as pesticide usage, as being detrimental to the
environment, and recognizing that consumerism and environmental
quality advocates groups had a role to play in the agricultural
society. He was a Davis graduate and a good student. I think he
really was the only person who could fill the role of trying to
deal with the extreme positions advocated by the governor, or
even Rose Bird. I thought I had a cordial working relationship
with Rose Bird, but I didn't have to work with her very closely.
Lage: She wasn't in too terribly long, was she?
Kendrick: No. Not more than a couple of years because when the chief
justice of the state Supreme Court position became vacant. Jerry
appointed her to that position.
Another political maneuver took place at this time, because
when Rich was first made director of the Department of Food and
Agriculture, the representative of agriculture on the cabinet was
Rose Bird, the secretary for agriculture and services. It was
tough for agriculture.
Earl Coke, under Governor Reagan, was the one that created
the secretary's position in the first place, and the agriculture
department had won the day by having a secretary of agriculture
and services with cabinet representation. Earl was a very close
confidant of the governor. But when the secretary was Rose Bird,
the agricultural community didn't feel represented.
Lage: She was the first one who didn't come out of agriculture, wasn't
she?
220
Kendrick: Yes, but the creation of the secretary of agriculture and
services was done by Governor Reagan. Prior to that time, the
director — the Department of Food and Agriculture had a cabinet
position. Then Governor Reagan made the super-agencies and
incorporated administratively more functions than just a single
department in those secretaryships. That's when the department's
administrator became subcabinet level. A group of agricultural
interests of the state, and I was included, met several times
with the governor, and ultimately prevailed upon him to recognize
the importance of agriculture and its representation as a cabinet
member. In due course the director of the Department of Food and
Agriculture was made a cabinet officer.
So Rich became a cabinet officer, which was an important
move. Even in a fairly hostile state government as far as
agriculture was concerned, when the governor was persuaded to pay
a little more attention to agriculture, Rich was the ideal person
to push the governor in subtle ways into positions that were
somewhat favorable to agriculture. Rich didn't enjoy the
undying, or uncompromising, support of all traditional
agriculture because they felt he was a little too sympathetic in
dealing with labor and a little too sympathetic towards consumers
"messing around" in agricultural matters — the same kind of move
that I was making in the University. The reason Rich and I
worked so well together. I think, is that we had the same
motivation and goals, and we both had to deal with fairly
traditional departments. So we had to make some changes.
Lage: Interesting correlation.
Kendrick: I felt that we had a very good relationship, and Rich stayed with
that role until Jerry Brown did not run for a third term.
The Deukmej ian-Gardner Years:
Stature and Its Budget
Restoring the University's
Kendrick: Now, we've gotten to the third change in the governorship during
my tenure. That occurred with Deukmej ian's election. Governor
Deukmej ian's relationship with the University, as all the
evidence shows, has been tremendously favorable.
Kendrick: Therein begins another regime as far as the University
administration is concerned; that's when Dave Gardner became
president of the University.
221
Lage: Is that by design that these presidential changes take place at
the same time the governor changes?
Kendrick: No.
Lage: Just has happened the last couple of times?
Kendrick: That's been a coincidence. I think governors [laughing] have
worn out our presidents, as much as internal activities are
concerned. I don't think David Saxon really wanted to put up
with another governor. He had served eight years with Jerry
Brown as governor and that took its toll from David's energy, I'm
certain.
Lage: So it's starting over again, with a new governor.
Kendrick: I think if he'd realized the support that was going to come from
the governor's chair in Sacramento, he might have looked at it in
a different light. But I think David Saxon was tired, worn out.
You get worn out. These jobs are just as abrasive as they can
be. There's a lot of glamour associated with being the president
of the University of California, but they have tough assignments.
You have people gnawing at you all the time. The moments of
glory are few and far between, and the rest of the time is spent
trying to keep the place together and trying to drain the swamp
filled with alligators. It's not all that it appears to be. In
my judgment, they earn every cent that they pay them because
they're short-lived positions. They're not the traditional
presidencies that used to be associated with a university or
college, where you spend your career as a president, enjoying all
the nice things that happen to you, where you're revered by the
total constituency of the institution. That's not the case
anymore. It's a rat race to stay ahead of the critics.
So, the Deukmej ian-Gardner era came, and David Gardner was
able to convince the governor that one of the things that he
could be long remembered for would be to restore the University
to its once-high stature, recognizing the fact that it was unique
and it had a quality faculty which was in danger of being
destroyed by not compensating it in relationship to its leading
competitive institutions. President Gardner convinced the
governor that he could do much to restore that quality by
preventing the drain of people going away to other places because
they received more attractive job offers. And that happened; in
the course of about two years' time, there was about a thirty-
five percent increase in faculty salaries, and we're now slightly
ahead of the average for our competitive eight institutions. In
my judgment, it was all attributed to the relationship that David
Gardner and Governor Deukmej ian have developed.
222
Lage: Do you have some knowledge about whether it's particularly
Gardner's approach that won Deukmej ian over, or do you think that
Deukmej ian had these sympathies?
Kendrick: No, I think Deukmej ian, more than the two previous governors,
understands the importance of education. In spite of his running
battle with [State Superintendent of Schools William] Konig over
the funding of community college and K-12 programs, I think the
governor really does understand quality education. I think that
if he could be convinced that the money going into education is
money well spent and not sort of frittered away in programs that
are not really directed towards education, he would be willing to
give these schools what they need. He recognizes that Honig's on
the other end of the political spectrum from him. So part of
their difference is a political difference; it's not just an
educational philosophy difference.
But with David Gardner and Governor Deukmej ian, I think both
showed up at the concert with the same sheet music and started
singing all of it together. They're true believers. I don't
think David had to spend a lot of time convincing him that the
University had been disadvantaged through the Brown
administration, and the most important thing that the governor
could do would be to restore the stature of the institution.
There was a lot of hard evidence that we were getting second and
third choices in our recruitment efforts, and we were losing some
significant faculty members from the campuses because they were
being attracted to higher salaries and greater opportunities
elsewhere. If this had been allowed to continue, it would be
many, many years before we could restore that kind of quality in
our institution.
I don't think the governor took a lot of convincing that
that was indeed true, and that he could gain positive points by
being identified with being sympathetic towards a quality higher
education support in the state. Of course, Gardner is a very
persuasive person in his own rights. He doesn't advocate
something without his homework being very well done; he's
articulate, and you'd have a hard time debating an issue and
winning against him. You can make points, but he's going to x.ake
counterpoints. I think he's developed this relationship with the
governor in a very admirable manner.
Just as when I was trying to get funding for some of these
special programs such as IPM, I wouldn't say, "You've got to do
it," and I don't think Gardner said, "You've got to do it." He
put it in the frame of giving the governor a choice. "You don't
have to do it, but if you don't, this is going to happen. If you
don't, we'll just continue to gradually deteriorate, little by
little. You won't notice any dramatic event, but in due course
it will show." Bear in mind that David arrived here having spent
223
Kendrick: a year as chairman of that national study that published with
great fanfare the document A Nation ^t Risk, which pointed out
the deficiencies of public education as it presently existed in
this country. The report said that if a foreign country had
tried to weaken this country, they could do no better than
destroy our educational system by dropping the quality.
That was a fairly powerful document, pointing out the
importance of education and the lack of competitiveness. So he
had the credentials to point out to the governor, and anybody
else who would listen, that we're just a part of that total
system. By neglect and lack of funding, the whole system was
going to be at risk. He had a powerful argument that something
had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. He pointed out
also that it didn't have to be done all at once. David proposed
another little bit of subtlety, that you could adopt a program of
improvement phased over several years if the deficiencies are too
great to overcome in a single year. He said let's have a goal
over a two- or three-year period, something that is fundable.
So, as the University and the faculty's salaries got better,
a lot of the internal unhappiness dropped. Of course Cooperative
Extension's salaries were linked to the funding adjustments also.
Another thing that David Gardner recognized, and I never had
to spend a lot of time persuading him not to do, was separating
out the faculty salaries from all academic salaries. David Saxon
always wanted to increase just the faculty, recognizing that they
were the backbone of the institution, I never argued with the
fact that they were the backbone of the institution, but there
were certainly a lot of other political aspects to increasing
faculty salaries alone. When you were talking about academics, I
had 550 hard-working academics in Cooperative Extension, and if
they had been so differentially treated in any academic salary
adjustment, and they had been organized, they would probably have
gone on strike.
But as long as the definition of faculty meant all academic
salaries, we could make a case for treating academics in some
fashion a little differently from the non-academics, for the
staff support. But you want to be careful about how you treat
them, too. They are an important part of the institution, and
they're part of what makes things function smoothly. David
Gardner understands that. He didn't take a lot of convincing.
So my relationship with David and his support were superb. I
felt I retired with more support and understanding than I had in
any of the three regimes. That was not to say that I didn't have
good support and understanding in the other two, but it was a
little easier to convince David of the importance of the
division's programs, and the role they played in the vitality of
the total institution.
224
Kendrick: I did not develop the same kind of relationship with the
Department of Food and Agriculture in the Deukmej ian regime that
I had with Rich Rominger and with Bru Christensen, and Jerry
Fielder, and Dick Lyng. The director of food and agriculture was
Clare Berry hill, dare was a former senator and a farmer. He
was a pretty politically-driven person.
I was not reappointed to serve on the State Board of Food
and Agriculture when my term expired in 1985. So my relationship
with the department was a little more distant than before. I had
turned over a good deal of the responsibilities of direct
relationship with segments of the department to Director [of the
Experiment Station] Lowell Lewis. So he maintained a closer
relationship with them than I did. But the University's
relationship overall with that particular regime in the
Department of Food and Agriculture tended to drift a little bit.
Lage: Lack of sympathy on Berryhill's part?
Kendrick: No. I think it was a lack of understanding of the role of the
University in agricultural research and extension. I don't think
his primary interests were in improving that relationship. In
one of the early sessions I had with him, I had to try and play
down one of the blasts that he had received from a member of the
faculty of the University who had accused him of something that
was not very complimentary. So we didn't start off on a very
good foot. He wanted to know why I would allow that sort of
expression to come forth from the University. He felt unjustly
accused of something, I don't even remember the subject. It was
not a very politic thing to do on the part of one of my
colleagues, but it was nevertheless nothing that I could control
or that I would attempt to do so.
Berryhill was also somewhat unsympathetic with the makeup of
the Board of Food and Agriculture. He didn't express it as such,
but you could tell that philosophically and politically it was
composed of more critics of traditional agriculturalism, a
characteristic of the kind of people Jerry Brown had appointed to
the board. He was out to make changes on the board and to have
people who were much more sympathetic toward traditional
agriculture.
Richard Peters was appointed president of the Board of Food
and Agriculture. Richard was an agriculturalist from Fresno, a
longtime supporter of the governor, both financially and morally.
He is an Armenian and a political confidante of the governor. I
had a reasonably good relationships with Richard. But my own
need to work as closely with the department as I had in previous
administrations was not as great, as I indicated, because the
director of the Agricultural Experiment Station was engaged in
225
Kendrick: more of the operational relationships. Cooperative Extension had
kind of an oblique relationship with the department, wherever
they were engaged in similar activities of an educational nature.
As far as the budgetary support was concerned, we had some
interesting developments with the governor, and that's one of the
topics of funding that we'll come to when we talk about special
projects that the experiment station undertook.
Lage: So that's what we'll turn to next time.
226
XII SPECIAL RESEARCH UNITS WITHIN THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT
STATION
Giannini Foundation for Research in Agricultural Economics
The Original Grant and Organization
[Date of Interview: October 22. 1987] ##
Lage: Today is October 22, 1987; this is our ninth session with James
Kendrick. We're going to talk about the Agricultural Experiment
Station and some of the special programs you began to introduce
flexibility into the research program.
Kendrick: The experiment station in 1968, under Director Clarence Kelly,
was certainly not performing unimportant research, but it was
having some trouble managing its meager resources in order to
meet all the defined problems of commercial agriculture. The
most vocal concern expressed by the clients, so to speak, the
commercial agricultural interests, was that we were not paying
enough attention to marketing and economic problems. That was
laid at the feet of the Giannini Foundation's not performing in a
manner that the commercial agricultural interests of the state
had been accustomed to, in dealing with the Giannini Foundation.
And that was due in large part to the personnel of the Giannini
Foundation.
Let me describe the Giannini Foundation because that's one
of the units we were going to discuss today.
Lage: Was that a unit within the — ?
Kendrick: That's a unit within the experiment station. It has a long
history because it goes back to an original grant from A. P.
Giannini, when he was president of the Bank of Italy, which was
the predecessor of the Bank of America. He gave the University
$1.5 million, from which they built Giannini Hall on the
227
Kendrick: Berkeley campus and had a residue left over, for which there was
a trust statement as to how that could be used. It was to
support agricultural research, aimed at improving the economic
status of a whole array of things. The charge would almost
include anything you wanted to do in the Agricultural Experiment
Station, but it became predominantly an economics research
institute.
The unique thing that the Giannini Foundation did in its
operation was to have fellows appointed in the Giannini
Foundation as a distinct appointment, in addition to an
experiment station appointment or a professorial appointment.
Lage : You mean one person would hold the three titles.
Kendrick: One person could be listed as a fellow in the Giannini
Foundation, as well as, say, an agricultural economist in the
experiment station. In those days they started as a junior
agricultural economist, and went to an assistant agricultural
economist, next an associate agricultural economist, and then
just agricultural economist. That was the series within the
experiment station, and then of course the parallel faculty
series was instructor, then an assistant professor, an associate
professor, and full professor. Each one of those steps were
ranks, and they constituted a promotion, from one rank to
another.
A fellow in the Giannini Foundation did not have any rank,
in those steps. You were just given the courtesy title as fellow
in the Giannini Foundation. The only qualification for being a
fellow in the Giannini Foundation was being appointed as a
regular faculty member in the Department of Agricultural
Economics. Originally, the only Department of Agricultural
Economics was on the Berkeley campus, so the Giannini Foundation
was centered, in its early years, on the Berkeley campus.
The director was also the chairman of the department at
Berkeley. In its early years, it addressed specifically economic
problems and market evaluations for particular commodities of
California's agricultural crops. It was highly regarded by
commercial agriculture as an organization within the University
that was really helping a lot in marketing the commodities
successfully. Some of the individuals who helped guide the
Giannini Foundation were Claude Hutchison, Harry Wellman, George
Mehren, Ray [Raymond] Bressler, David Clarke [Jr.], and Loy
Sammet — I'm not sure Loy was ever director of the Giannini
Foundation. But in any event, those were the people who paid a
lot of attention to the agriculture's economic stresses and
strains.
228
Kendrick: Well, as I indicated, the only requirement for being a fellow of
the Giannini Foundation was being appointed to the faculty of the
departments of agricultural economics at Davis or Berkeley. And
associate fellows were those who were agricultural economists in
forestry, at Berkeley, or economists in the soils and
environmental sciences at Riverside, and all of the agricultural
economists in Cooperative Extension. To help the director in the
governance of the foundation there was what was called an
executive committee composed of representatives from Davis,
Berkeley, and Cooperative Extension.
The foundation also supported a rather comprehensive
graduate library. Over time, it has developed into one of the
most complete libraries of agricultural economics that I'm aware
of — so it has a good reputation.
Lage: Did the fellows get an extra stipend?
Kendrick: No. It's a courtesy title. All of the University's agricultural
economists published under the logo of the Giannini Foundation,
and so the Giannini Foundation for Agricultural Economics has a
reputation far exceeding the amount of money that goes into
supporting the program. Most of what was left from the original
1.5 million-dollar grant after building Giannini Hall, which has
been increased by its investment value, essentially supports the
Giannini Library. There was a small amount to support the
administration of the foundation — the director's stipend, a few
graduate fellowships, and a few dollars for specific research
programs. The truth is that the main support for agricultural
economic research was the regular University funding, plus grant
funds that these individuals obtained from other sources.
But since nearly all the research was published with the
acknowledgement of the Giannini Foundation, it's easy to see why
the reputation of the Giannini Foundation was really gained by
the total activity of all the University's agricultural
economists pursuing their regular research programs within the
University of California. So it had a reputation far beyond its
financial resources. It was always a problem for me to respond
to the nostalgic memories of people who said, "The Giannini
Foundation is no longer addressing the needs of agriculture. The
faculty seemed to be more concerned with their own professional
advancement, and they publish stuff we can't understand."
Agricultural economics was moving into econometrics and complex
mathematical analyses, which wasn't being translated into
language and operations that the commercial agricultural people
understood. So it was perceived that the Giannini Foundation no
longer was really addressing problems of agriculture.
229
Kendrick: Also, some of the things that the commercial representatives were
interested in were not really academic research. As the pressure
for academic advancement continued to exist, assistant professors
and assistants in the experiment station realized that their
future depended upon their ability to produce research that had
quality in the eyes of their peers. They sort of drifted with
the academic current, and often those kinds of research problems
were somewhat remote and abstract as far as commercial needs were
concerned.
Lage: That answer probably didn't satisfy your agricultural
constituency.
Kendrick: No, it certainly didn't.
Restructuring to Meet the Practical Needs of Commercial
Agriculture
Kendrick: So we went through a number of changes of administration to try
to construct a Giannini Foundation that would be able to address
the problems of commercial agriculture a little bit differently.
One of the first things I did to address that problem, after
receiving some administrative advice from the executive
committee, was to decouple the directorship of the Giannini
Foundation from the chairman of the department at Berkeley.
There was also some degree of rivalry between the Berkeley
Department of Agricultural Economics and the Davis Department of
Agricultural Economics. The Davis department felt that they were
getting only what was left over from the meager funds of the
Giannini Foundation and that they were not being treated
favorably, relative to their ability to address some of these
problems and in the support of a library of their own. That
friendly academic rivalry exists today, and probably will always
exist because it's the nature of academic competition.
Lage: And of the relationship between Davis and Berkeley.
Kendrick: Yes, it comes to play there.
One of the things we tried in the early 1970s before
separating the department chair from the directorship was to
appoint an active associate director of the Giannini Foundation,
who was given the responsibility of trying to develop a program
within the Giannini Foundation with what resources it had, and
also with the expectation that it would obtain outside grant
money to support particular kinds of research problems.
230
Lage: To focus on the more practical needs?
Kendrick: Yes. And that was done but not forced upon the director. The
executive committee of the foundation was willing to try whatever
would reduce the climate of criticism as far as the external
community was concerned.
The man whom I asked to become this associate director of the
Giannini Foundation, and work with the chair, was Dr. Ken
Farrell. (He is now my successor as vice president.) Ken
operated with a level of frustration for several years trying to
persuade the faculty to address some of the problems. But it was
a frustrating experience for him. He then had an opportunity to
go to Washington, D.C.. in the United States Department of
Agriculture, as the deputy administrator of the Economic Research
Service. And that is where he went. I won't describe his career
because he can do that later.
Lage: He'll have his turn, maybe in twenty years. [laughter]
Kendrick: But that was his last official association with us. He was. at
the time that I asked him to assume the role of associate
director of the Giannini Foundation, an extension agricultural
economist with Cooperative Extension. So he was a known quantity
with a good reputation as an agricultural economist, even then.
Lage: It almost seems as if this kind of research belongs more in
extension. It's very practically oriented.
Kendrick: Well, it probably does now, with a redefinition of what
extension's mission is, and with more emphasis on practical
research in extension than exists in the experiment station. But
at that time, that kind of work was the prerogative of the
experiment station, and it was protected very much by the
experiment station. The attitude, even when I was in the early
years of the vice presidency, was that extension was incapable of
doing research. And it took quite a while to neutralize that
attitude and the feeling that Cooperative Extension didn't have
adequately trained personnel to pursue research. There was a
certain justification in that attitude, because initially the
training of many individual members of extension was short of
Ph.D. and masters degree education. They didn't have an exposure
to the experimental method, and statistical analysis of the
results was not widely practiced.
So there was some justification in believing that the
personnel in extension, in those early days, was not a trained
research staff. But as the educational requirements for
appointments, particularly the specialists, was increased and
ultimately held to be the same for extension specialists as it
231
Kendrick: was for initial appointments in the experiment station, there has
been less criticism of that differential now, and I think quite
rightly so.
Well, the next attempt to reorganize the Giannini Foundation
so it could stand on its own was to separate the directorship
from the chair at Berkeley. With the help of Chet McCorkle, who
at that time was the vice president of the University, we were
able to generate a half of an FTE to go with the half-FTE which
the Giannini Foundation resources supported, and we created a new
FTE, a full-time-equivalent position, for a director. We went
recruiting for a director, and found Del [B. Delworth] Gardner at
Utah State University. He was a full professor, who had a good
reputation in the field, and we persuaded Del to come and be the
director of the Giannini Foundation. We arranged for him to be
appointed to the Davis Department of Agricultural Economics, but
indicated that the headquarters of the Giannini Foundation would
continue to exist at Berkeley, due to the fact that the library
was there. It also seemed to us that this arrangement would
facilitate cooperation between the members of the departments at
Davis and Berkeley. Riverside didn't really have enough
personnel to contribute much to the foundation's program. It was
always a source of disappointment to the Riverside administration
that Riverside was not able to have a department of agricultural
economics, but that goes back prior to my time. I think it was
due to Harry Wellman's view that we didn't need any more
[laughing] agricultural economists in the University of
California. I may be jumping to a conclusion that's unwarranted,
but I'm not so sure that that's off the mark.
At any rate, the agricultural economics activity was
centered on the Berkeley and Davis campuses. Del continued to
function as the director of the Giannini Foundation and did a
pretty good job of elevating the visibility of the foundation.
But I think he had, over the course of his five or six years'
tenure in that role, increasing difficulties persuading his
colleagues on the faculty to address some of the more practical
problems that were surfacing. It was a period when I was sort of
relaxed about the foundation because I had a director, and any
inquiry I received which needed attention I just sent on to the
director and asked if he could take care of it.
Del wound up taking care of it, but he wound up taking care
of most requests pretty much on his own. He really wasn't able
to obtain the commitment of the broad array of the agricultural
economists, who existed in the two departments, in the program.
So it was kind of a frustrating experience for him.
When Lowell Lewis came to my staff, we were still having
frustrations with the Giannini Foundation, and I turned the
problem over to him as the director of the experiment station.
232
Kendrick: He and the executive committee subsequently designed another way
to handle the Giannini Foundation. Del resigned from the
directorship and became a full professor of agricultural
economics in the Davis department.
The next iteration for managing the Giannini Foundation was
to use the executive committee, chaired by the director of the
experiment station. So for a while, Lowell Lewis was the
director of this governing board for the Giannini Foundation.
The executive group consisted of the chairs of the departments at
Berkeley and Davis, and the group leader in extension for the
extension agricultural economists, plus an additional
representative from the two departments, and there may have teen
an additional extension component also, I'm not sure.
Lage: It sounds as if the foundation had no leverage to apply to
counteract the academic direction.
Kendrick: I think you're quite right. The foundation doesn't have any
leverage because it doesn't have very much money for programs of
research. If I were to characterize leverage as far as my own
responsibility for the total program was concerned, I would say
my leverage was money and persuasion. And I found that money was
the biggest persuader that I had.
Lage: [laughs] That sums it up, probably, for a lot of your programs.
Kendrick: Well, I think that is very true. And the reason I say that is
because, as we will subsequently describe in some of these
programs within the experiment station, the lack of leverage was
due to the lack of flexible money to allocate to people to
conduct particular programs of timely importance.
Lage: So if you had flexible money to support research, and you could
define a particular research problem, you could find someone to
carry out the research.
Kendrick: That's right. What I really needed was a big fund for grant
money, where we could define the terms of the grant in such a way
that you could make short-term grants of one, two, three, four,
five years, and at the end of that period you would have the
money returned to you and you could redirect it to something
else.
Lage: Did you approach the agricultural community who were asking for
these changes in the foundation?
Kendrick: Yes, I suggested that we should establish an agricultural
research foundation and make grants from it. But I was always
reminded that, "Well, the state already appropriates sixty
million dollars to you. Why can't you find flexibility in that
233
Kendrick: sixty million dollars?" I'd go through the standard explanation.
"Yes, I have all that money, but I don't have any control over
most of it because it's already supporting people who have tenure
and who are regular members of the faculty. And I also have an
agricultural field station that I could close, but that doesn't
seem the way to manage a program. So I'm left with less than a
million dollars of flexible money." These are the kinds of
things you have to consider when you're trying to administer a
program and keep your resources flexible enough so that you can
direct them to current problems.
Well, the Giannini Foundation, as I understand it to now
operate — it was when I left office — has an executive committee,
but instead of the director of the experiment station being the
chair, they elect a chair. Or, if they don't elect a chair, it
alternates periodically between the chairman of the department of
Berkeley and the chairman of the department at Davis. The
committee administers the program of the Giannini Library. They
have a few fellowships that they can grant from the fund, and
they make research grants to applicants for particular kinds of
defined programs. So the Giannini Foundation, with what money it
does now have that's flexible, operates as a granting agency.
Lage: And are they committed to try to grant research funds for these
more practical problems, or — ?
Kendrick: I think they tend to grant them into short-term definable
programs that lead into what the executive committee regards as
important current economic issues as far as agriculture is
concerned.
Agricultural Issues Center
The Idea and the Funding ##
Kendrick: Since we're talking about the Giannini Foundation, let me slip
over into the Agricultural Issues Center. One might say, "You've
got the Giannini Foundation, why do you need an Agricultural
Issues Center?"
This organized research unit is in the experiment station,
and it includes extension, so it's not just exclusively
experiment station personnel. It had its origin at one of my
retreats with the Executive Bulls. I'll explain what the
Executive Bulls is. It is an informal organization that meets
twice a year, for a twenty-four hour period, composed of
representatives of agricultural enterprises, widely diversified
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Kendrick: as far as the activities are concerned. The representatives who
are members of the Bulls are the senior managers of the
activities. What the group does is hold a bull session, so hence
the name Executive Bulls.
I was kind of shocked to be included in an organization
called the Executive Bulls because I thought it pursued [laughs]
other kinds of activities. But. nevertheless, it is a group that
I became quite fond of, and it was an important source for me in
assessing what the current problems affecting the agriculture
enterprises in California were.
Well, in one of these sessions, I roomed with an executive
from the Kellogg Foundation. The Kellogg Foundation made grants
to institutions to pursue particular kinds of problems, such as
programs to improve and expand computer use in agriculture or
programs to improve the transfer of technology to practical use.
These are mere examples of a wide variety of programs the Kellogg
Foundation has supported over the years of its existence.
Well, this representative of the Kellogg Foundation and I
were discussing Kellogg's program, and he indicated to me that
they were interested in fostering the development of regional
centers addressing policy matters affecting agriculture. And
that they had in mind setting up four regional centers and a
national center to study policy matters. I thought to myself,
"Well, if Kellogg is going to fund regional centers to study
policy issues, I'm certainly going to go after one for the West
located in California." In order to meet the requirements of the
grant. I came home and appointed a committee to design a program
and a budget. The composition of the committee included
representatives of several different disciplines, but it had
strong representation from the agricultural economists. I also
included representatives from Stanford and Santa Clara — because
if we were going to have a regional center, we had to make sure
that we were including more than just Berkeley or the Davis
campus in this program. Also, on that initial study committee
was a representative from the business world, the former vice
president for agricultural affairs for the Bank of America.
Chairing that committee was Alex McCalla, a professor of
agricultural economics at Davis, who was one of my administrative
supporters during the period when he was the dean of the College
of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Davis, and also an
associate director of the experiment station. Alex was a very
good chair who also was very good at conceptualizing things. He
was a good builder. He was just the right kind of a chair to put
in charge of developing that concept.
Lage: Was this done without grants, yet, from the Kellogg Foundation?
235
Kendrick: Yes, that's true. It was done with our own resources.
The notion that I tried to transmit to the steering
committee was that I wanted a program that was broader than
economics. I thought that the policy matters affecting the
future of California's agriculture dealt with toxics, dealt with
environmental issues, dealt with labor issues, dealt with
marketing issues. In addition, I could see that the genetic
engineering matters were coming to the front, and those were
policy issues also. So there were economic issues, as far as
marketing and foreign policy and the like, but there were also
some other issues that weren't based primarily on economic
concerns.
Lage:
Kendrick:
What date do you have for this?
started?
Do you recall when this all
Well, the center is about three years old, and it was about 1983
that we began talking seriously about it. And the idea was for
the committee to develop a grant proposal to send to Kellogg.
Well, they worked very well and put together a marvelous
program that I thought was just what we needed. Kellogg, in the
meantime, decided that they would like to start slower than
originally planned. So they established a national center to see
how that would operate before they entertained any proposal for
regional centers. The national center was located in Washington,
D.C., at Resources for the Future — the organization that
President Hitch headed up briefly, when he terminated his
presidency at the University of California.
At Resources for the Future, they found Ken Farrell, who was
a fellow of Resources for the Future, and he became the director
of the national Center for Agricultural and Food Policy Research.
So that's where the Kellogg grant wound up, at a national center.
Meanwhile, having charged up this committee — and they
produced such a good product — I decided that I wanted to get some
funding into it. So I put it in the asking budget for '84, I
think it was, at a half-million dollars, in order to get it off
the ground and get it started. I expected the agricultural
industry representatives of California to say, "Now, finally he's
doing something useful for us," and it would have a lot of
support in the legislature, and it would go through with no
trouble.
It was David Gardner's first year as president, his first
budget. 1984. He thought it was a great idea, too. As a matter
of fact, he spoke in support of it when he was talking to
agriculture groups. He was one of my best lobbyists, in a sense.
So I felt pretty good about it and was very surprised to find
236
Kendrick: less than enthusiastic interest among California's organized
agriculture in the University's establishing an agricultural
policy research and study center.
Lage: They didn't see it related to their immediate needs?
Kendrick: I ultimately found out what the problem was. Commercial
agriculture does not trust faculty to meddle with policies that
might affect their economic well-being. There had just been
published about that time a paper that got a lot of publicity
written by a member of the faculty — not in agriculture — from
Berkeley, and co-authored by another person from UCLA, suggesting
that the citizens of Los Angeles were subsidizing the
agricultural enterprises in the San Joaquin Valley to the
detriment of the cost of water delivered to Los Angeles. Now.
that's a long and complicated story, and it's full of debate.
The assumptions that people make for their points of view are not
necessarily congruent, but the topic makes alarming headlines,
when one reads about the so-called unfairness of the water
distribution and costs associated with agriculture in the San
Joaquin Valley versus southern California.
That had no sooner appeared in print than my phone began to
ring, asking me how I would let people publish such nonsense.
Well, it was sort of "here we go again." [laughter] Jim
Kendrick does not tell the faculty what they can and cannot
publish. But I would point out to these complaining individuals
that if we'd had something like an agricultural policy center
with some kind of a review policy in place, that irresponsible
claims would be at least reduced to a minimum because we'd have a
review process that made sure that claims and assumptions and
facts were indeed supportable, and not just somebody's idea. But
that point, again, was lost.
Lage: I can see you try to turn most everything to your advantage.
Kendrick: Well, I try. [laughter] But I guess that's the politics of the
situation.
Anyway, the half-million-dollar request got pruned to a
$250,000 request before it got into the governor's budget, and
that was just an economy measure. Then it worked its way through
the legislature, and even this meager $250,000, which would have
been quite helpful, was having problems because agriculture's
representatives weren't rushing forward to say, "It's a great
thing, you've got to support it." And if we couldn't get the
agriculture people to support it, you can be certain that the
legislature's Ways and Means Committee wasn't going to go out of
their way to just give the University extra money that
agriculture thought that they didn't need anyway. Commercial
237
Kendrick: agriculture was certainly leery of the University developing
agricultural policy, which they thought was the purpose of the
proposed center.
So, we spent a lot of time in Sacramento in support of this,
and I wrote an editorial in the California Agriculture suggesting
that studying policy was different than advocating policy or
supporting particular actions; that the University was the proper
vehicle to analyze policy options so that agriculture would have
some knowledge of what their alternatives were and what their
options were. But that distinction was somewhat obscured. In
social issues, it's very difficult to separate study and research
of policy matters from the perception of advocating one position
over others. In technical matters, we, of course, advocate all
kinds of policies — we advocate certain actions because they would
increase yields or control more pests and diseases.
In studying policy matters, you tread very lightly in taking
advocacy positions because you're dealing with political and
emotional subjects, and the University's faculty and staff are
not policy-makers. They shouldn't be. But that's a fine line to
walk, and we have members of the institution who don't understand
that fine line. They find themselves advocating certain kinds of
policy — the small farm group, for instance, with their interest
in the 160-acre limitation, had some rather strong statements
made about that. So it's an advocacy role that makes life
difficult for someone who's trying to be objective.
I was going to say how this got resolved. It was suggested
that if we take "policy" out of the title, and change "policy" to
"issues," and it became an agricultural issues research and study
center, that we would not have as much problem.
Lage: Now, who suggested that?
Kendrick: They were the representatives of commercial agriculture, the
Sacramento lobbyists. So, I said, "That's no great problem, I'm
just stubborn enough to try and educate people that we're not
policy advocates, we're policy researchers but I'm also a
pragmatist, and I would like the center because I think it's
needed and I think it can make a significant contribution, so if
you think it takes 'issues' rather than 'policy' in the title to
get this thing off the dead center, I'll go along with it." So
it ultimately became the Agricultural Issues Center. And it
looked like it was going to get through with no more problems, at
its quarter of a million dollar budget level.
In an attempt to reassure the agricultural community that we
were not going to be a threat to their prerogative to determine
policies affecting their own welfare, we hired Dick Lyng to
survey a select number of California's agricultural leaders.
238
Kendrick: This was just prior to his being appointed secretary of
agriculture for the U.S. and while he was working out of
Washington, B.C., as a consultant. He had the confidence of
practically all of California's agricultural leaders, and we
hoped that his intervention on our behalf would help in gaining
their support. Dick also asked these leaders for ideas
concerning issues they felt important to study. In the end he
gave us a written report on the results of his survey with
suggestions for the advisory board and issues which needed
attention. I believe that his role in the process of gaining
political support for the center was very positive. At any rate,
he was convinced of the value of having a center to study these
agricultural issues and he supported it enthusiastically.
Just when it appeared that we had successfully countered all
of the criticism and would get the center funded at $250,000, the
budget got whacked again in a mark-up session in the Ways and
Means Committee, because a lot of issues were being heard
affecting the University's total program. The legislative
analyst had given a negative recommendation of the issues center,
on the basis that, although it was a good program and there was
nothing wrong with its conceptualization and its need, it was
something that ought to be funded by the agricultural interests
themselves. I'd gone that route, and I didn't really want
agricultural interests funding this center because I wanted it
free and unencumbered from any kind of specific influence.
I think we were going to be able to beat that criticism, but
the legislative analyst was losing nearly all of his
recommendations concerning other issues in the University's
budget, and the University's position was being sustained in
almost all of them. They came to the Ag Issues Center, and the
comment from one the legislators was, "Well, maybe we can let the
legislative analyst win one of them." [laughter] So they took a
hundred and ten thousand dollars off of it, and I wound up with
$140,000.
Lage: Not too much to get something going.
Kendrick: It was almost down to the point where I considered briefly
saying, "Well, if it doesn't seem that important, we won't take
the money." The notion I had was that if you give in completely,
you create the attitude that, "Well, they'll get along with
whatever we give them." It really kind of emasculated what the
original concept of how we would approach that program — but we
decided we'd swallow our pride and take the $140,000 and do with
it what we could, and demonstrate that we had a program of value.
We hoped to augment subsequent budgets through grants or go back
at them with another request. The last act that I created in the
budget just before I retired was to put in a request for another
239
Kendrick: hundred thousand dollars to augment that original appropriation.
That got lost — it emerged and stayed in the University's budget,
bat it got lost in the legislative battle again.
Choosing a Diverse Advisory Board
Lage : So there isn't a strong commitment — or an understanding of it.
Kendrick: I think the center and its program are gaining a reputation for
usefulness and visibility. Like all such programs as they get
started, they have to demonstrate their worth and the usefulness
of their contributions. Hal Carter, a professor of agricultural
economics at the Davis campus, is the director. The center was
designed to have an external advisory board to help guide the
direction of the program. I decided that I would appoint that
board so the vice president could maintain some involvement with
the center. The board was composed of twelve members. It has a
representative from labor, and the consumers, and from banking,
and water interests, the processing industry, and farming
operations. As a matter of fact, the legislation that authorized
the establishment of this center defined the broad areas of
representation which should appear on that board.
Lage: Was that based on your design?
Kendrick: It was based on material we put into the legislation. And the
board is of high quality.
Lage: Is there such a thing as "the" water interests?
Kendrick: No, there isn't. I had fun trying to find the kinds of people
who I thought would bring an objective, open point of view to the
board. I can't recall offhand the names of the people who were
on the board — you can probably augment that in due course. But
the water interests [laughs] are at least represented on the
board by an interesting person, who is an attorney, the senior
attorney of a firm in Riverside. The firm in Riverside is Best,
Best, and Krieger, and the attorney is Arthur Littleworth.
Arthur Littleworth served on the ad-hoc water commission
appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to study the water problems of
California. Art has become very knowledgeable in water policy
and water law. He represents water districts in some of the
legal claims, but over and above that, I've talked with Art a
number of times about water and water problems in the state of
California. He has in my judgment a very good understanding of
240
Kendrick: the fundamental problems of distribution and the value of
protecting environmental qualities and the like, and responding
to the domestic needs as well.
The interesting thing about Art's relationship with the
Kendrick family is that he was president of the Riverside City
School Board, when Evelyn was a member, and he and Evelyn were
the two who had to run for the re-election in 1966. So it was a
personal link, as well as one that I felt would bring a lot of
quality to a board of this nature and would also get southern
California represented on the board. He has taken a deep
interest in the center.
The chairman of the board is Bill Allewelt, a retired chief
executive officer of Tri-Valley, the large food processor —
canning tomatoes and peaches, mostly fruits, some vegetables.
But tomato canning was the big backbone of the Tri-Valley
operation. Bill is a graduate of the University of California at
Davis, in agricultural economics. He is a member of the
Executive Bulls and a demonstrated successful agricultural
manager, one very dedicated to the mission of the University of
California and knowledgeable about agriculture, whom I've stayed
in touch with regularly.
The banker who I appointed to the board is president of the
Bank of Stockton, Robert Eberhardt, also a regent of the
University of the Pacific, and a person quite knowledgeable about
agriculture financing. He had served on the banking commission
for the state of California.
The labor representative who I asked to serve was at the
time chairman of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, Jyrl
James- Ma ssengale. She is a lawyer with a law firm in southern
California and had represented management in some instances in
dealing with labor- management problems. She was appointed by
Deukmejian as chair of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
She's a black lady and was trying to bring peace and objectivity
to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, but she of course was
not perceived by the Cesar Chavez group as being sympathetic tc
their point of view. She has subsequently resigned from that
position, but she remains on the Agricultural Issues Center
board.
The environmental and consumer interests were represented by
Lois Salisbury, from Public Advocates law firm in San Francisco.
I was not able to get well acquainted with Lois because she was
busy having a youngster at the time we were beginning to meet
with the board, and she was unavailable for those first meetings.
She brings a point of view that's well thought out, but it's
certainly contrary to seme of the traditional agricultural
241
Kendrick: viewpoints. Both Hal Carter and I felt she would be a valuable
addition to the board because she could at least keep the
traditional agriculturalists on their toes.
In addition. I asked Henry Schacht, who writes a column
about agriculture which appears regularly in the San Francisco
Chronicle, if he would serve on the board, and he agreed to do
so. The dairy interests were represented by a dairyman from the
Modesto area, Arnold Barcellos.
Lage: Now, what would be the role of the board of a group like that?
Kendrick: Well, they're advisory and they attempt to keep the program of
the center relevant to issues that were important to the future
of California agriculture.
Lage: So they work with the director —
Kendrick: They work with the director —
Lage: — to define the problems —
Kendrick: Yes. And the vice president meets with them. Another member of
the board is the owner of a large successfully operated vegetable
and fruit produce firm in southern California, Howard Marguleas,
the chief executive officer of Sundesert. His company markets
dates, citrus, tomatoes, watermelons, and grapes. Howard is a
very successful entrepreneur in agriculture. Henry Voss,
president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, and Gray don
Nichols, a successful farmer in the San Joaquin Valley and in the
Sacramento Delta region, are also members of the advisory board.
So agriculture is well represented on the board. I think the
board is composed of significant people, who represent an array
of activities that characterize California's agricultural
enterprises and organizations interested in agriculture.
Lage: Just one comment to keep you on your toes here: I would guess
that the person you had to represent labor really wouldn't be
somebody very well accepted by agricultural labor — not just Cesar
Chavez, but in general.
Kendrick: I had problems seeking that labor representative, and I probably
could be questioned on why I didn't get organized labor on the
board, but I did not want to create an environment in which I had
a battle on my hands at every meeting.
Lage: But what about somebody like Harold Gilliam, whom you had as
representative of the environmental movement on another board,
who is not a leader of an environmental group necessarily, but
242
Lage: somebody very knowledgeable and sympathetic to the environmental
movement. Wouldn't there be a counterpart for the labor
movement?
Kendrick: Well, that's where I perceived Ms. James-Massengale to be very
knowledgeable about labor laws. It wasn't because she happened
to represent management on some issues in the National Labor
Relations activities that I chose her. She knew a lot about
labor, labor law, and labor organizations. A lawyer can
represent one side or the other, and I was anxious to have
labor's viewpoint and labor's concerns expressed on the board,
but I didn't want to create a board in which I had my traditional
agriculturists sitting glaring at the labor representative and
never really addressing the issue. It just becomes an argument.
I chose very carefully to try and get the viewpoints on the table
without polarizing the individuals because they don't like one
another. And that is not easy to do in agricultural labor
relations, because it's a very emotional issue. Water's another
one, and I chose, I thought, wisely there because I chose a known
quantity, a person who was accustomed to arbitration, and
accustomed to negotiation, accustomed to listening to an opposing
point of view and working his way objectively through an analysis
of all the issues.
That's not always possible to do in agricultural matters
because there are some strongly held views on one side or
another. When one refers to the agricultural industry of
California, it really doesn't describe the agricultural
enterprise of California. It's not a unified industry such as
you find in the automotive industry producing more or less a
single product. It is an amalgamation of anarchies [laughter],
in that everyone is for themselves. The citrus grower isn't
particularly concerned about what happens to the lettuce grower —
except if it becomes a common labor issue. Then they go marching
together. But if it's a marketing issue, let the citrus people
take care of themselves.
Lage :
So it is not an industry in the usual sense of the word,
that is defined with uniform goals. Even water separates them,
the northerners and the southerners. About the only thing I know
that unifies agriculture at all are labor and taxes.
And that's two of their big issues. I noticed in those farm
magazines that they focus on labor and taxes.
Kendrick: Yes. That's right.
Lage: I noticed that you appointed a couple of women to this board.
Was that a new step for the agricultural division?
243
Kendrick: No, I had previous advisory committees with women serving on
them. I wanted minorities as well as women represented on this
board. The last person. I appointed to the board is an executive
from Sun Diamond — the Sun Diamond public affairs officer, Richard
Douglas, who had spent time in the USDA as one of Dick Lyng's
staff aides. He's a black agricultural economist. I think we
did pretty well getting women, minorities, and the traditional
and nontraditional agricultural activities represented on a board
that doesn't have very many positions to fill. I left my
successor with one vacancy on the board. It was intended that
each member have a three-year term with reappointments permitted.
In order to start that sequence and create an overlap of
membership, we determined one, two, and three— year appointments
by lot for each of these first appointees.
That center was my last creative act as far as trying to do
something for the future of the program in research and
extension. I would guess that the jury is out on whether or not
that is going to take. They don't have a lot of money to operate
on yet. It has good leadership. Its board is enthusiastic and
very supportive; they see the need for the program, and they are
people who are not without influence.
Making the West a Force in Agricultural Policy
Kendrick: The other motive I had in trying to get an issues center
established concerns national issues. The West does not get well
considered in national agricultural policy. It is perceived to
be sort of specialty- crop agriculture; it has many commodities
and crops that get into commerce, and therefore when you line up
the growers of vegetables or fruits and nuts against the Midwest
corn growers or soy bean farmers, they are easily outnumbered.
They don't have near the influence in national policies because
agriculture policies are dominated by corn, wheat, soy beans,
beef, and dairy interests. Irrigated agriculture, or range
agriculture, is sort of regarded as western agriculture, and it
can take care of itself, or it gets traded off in various
options.
Economists and spokespersons for agricultural policy are
more apt to emerge from the midwestern or eastern universities
such as Maryland, Georgetown, Harvard, Iowa State, Michigan
State, or Minnesota. And while we have a number of western
people who participate in specific events — we have had a few who
served on the President's Council of Economic Advisors as
agricultural representatives — the West doesn't have a very strong
voice when these policy matters are discussed at the national
level. We haven't had an organization that has been identified
244
Kendrick: with paying particular attention to these national or
international issues. And that's what I had in mind in trying to
get an Agricultural Issues Study and Research Center established
with a great deal of visibility, so that eventually a person or a
group or a committee addressing national agricultural issues
might automatically think, "Well, have we heard from that western
agricultural issues center? What is their point of view relative
to this matter or that matter?"
Lage: You'd think that argument would appeal both to the agriculture
community here and to the legislature.
Kendrick: Well, it does. But agriculture is not sure that they want an
academic voice. They want their own voice, and the history of
this center working with commercial agriculture is too recent for
them to see what the product of an agricultural issues center is
vis-a-vis their needs. And I think it's going to take years to
work that thing through. You don't create a reputation overnight.
Lage: No, that's right. This is a long-term —
Kendrick: So I'm not disappointed with what we've got going here; I think
if it serves any usefulness at all. it will grow and be
supported. If it doesn't, it will disappear and be a memory.
But the other thing going for it is that the former director
of the National Center for Agricultural and Food Policy is Ken
Farrell, who is now the vice president of the University's
agricultural program. I'm sure that wasn't a primary reason why
he was appointed my successor, but it certainly doesn't hurt
having his interest and his former experience in the national
center brought to bear to oversee this regional center. So I
feel quite good about this as a program. This is an example of
an activity that I would never have been able to put together as
an inexperienced, young administrator in the early stages of my
responsibility. I had to do a lot of politicking. It's a good
example of how important external community relationships and
internal politics within the University are in order to
accomplish something in the University. If I hadn't been able to
get this item in the President's budget in the first place, it
wouldn't have gone anywhere.
Developing Support for Agriculture in an Urban Society
Lage:
Was it a struggle to get it in the budget?
Kendrick: No, it wasn't. The President — David Gardner— saw this as a
useful contribution almost immediately.
245
Lage: He sounds very supportive of the agriculture division.
Kendrick: Yes, he is.
Lage: Is there something in his background that makes him sympathetic?
Kendrick: He jokingly refers to the fact that he had some early exposure to
practical agriculture on an uncle's ranch, or farm, in Montana, I
think it was. He quickly perceived that that was not a future
that he wanted to be engaged in; it was hard work and long hours
[laughing], and the economic return wasn't very great. So he,
like most of us, is of an age to have had grandparents or parents
in some kind of agricultural enterprise. But that experience is
fast disappearing; most of the people presently in their thirties
and forties have no vivid memory of any kind of agricultural
association. I didn't grow up on a farm; I'm a product of an
academic family, but both of my parents were raised on farms, and
Evelyn was raised on a farm. Her parents were farmers, and you
get back one generation from mine, and almost everybody had some
kind of an agricultural association. The younger members of
today's society do not have the understanding of agriculture's
contribution to their well-being and value system that we have
traditionally had in our population.
And that's another factor in the difficulties of operating
an agriculture-supporting enterprise in the present urban-
dominated society where the legislature is an expression of urban
society. It's difficult to convince people that some
agricultural programs or problems are as important as AIDS or
poverty or homelessness — and I would be presumptuous to assume
that some of them are as important. I would say no, they're not
as important as some of those excruciating problems associated
with joblessness and job displacements, and the like. You have
to manage these affairs so that they fit into a total program in
a relatively compatible way, not to the exclusion of somebody
else's major problem. Crime in the street, the drug scene and all
the rest of it are issues that people in the legislature have to
wrestle with. Do you put your money here, or there? Do you put
it in the Agricultural Issues Center or do you put it in prisons?
[laughs]
Unless you're willing to help people think their way through
that, and not get upset because your pet project doesn't get
supported immediately, you're in the wrong business. You've
really got to come after these things in a totally open, objective
way, and that's why I perceived the vice president's role to be
an advocate for the agricultural needs and to interpret for the
agricultural community how we fit in dealing with total societal
needs. My role was to try and explain to agriculture that there
are other competing needs of society, as well as trying to
246
Kendrick: advocate the agricultural needs at the same time. I found it fun
to be in that role. But it certainly is a challenge and somewhat
frustrating at times.
Well, we spent a lot of time on two issues, or two units of
activity, but I think they are important activities as far as the
experiment station and extension programs are concerned. And
extension has a major share of the program responsibilities in
the issues center.
Kearney Foundation for Soil Science
Genesis and Direction
Kendrick: The first attempt to introduce flexibility of funding so that we
could address programs of more current interest than it was possi
ble with previous special appropriations was done with the Kearney
Foundation for Soil Science. There was a fund created by the Uni
versity for the pursuit of soil science research, which resulted
from the sale of property in the San Joaquin Valley, the Kearney
Ranch. That property was originally given to the University with
the hope, at least, that there would be a campus of the University
of California established in the lower San Joaquin Valley. And
was pursued rather vigorously by the [Chester] Rowell family.
Lage : Now, when was this?
Kendrick: That goes back to Robert Gordon Sproul's time. The San Joaquin
Valley interests really wanted a med school. I think, but they
also wanted a campus of the University. I don't know if it was
felt the property was surplus to the University's needs or it
wasn't located where a campus would be desirable, or what, but
for some reason, Bob Underbill, who was the secretary-treasurer
of the Regents, sold it and got a good price for it. Part of the
proceeds from that sale were set aside by the Regents to function
as a foundation for research in soil problems affecting agricul
ture. So the Kearney Foundation for Soil Science became a reality.
In the early days of its existence with its handsome annual yield
of several hundred thousand dollars, it was administered by the
chairman of the Department of Soil Science at Berkeley.
Lage: So it was something you inherited.
Kendrick: Yes. And it became rather identified as an augmentation of the
supporting funds for the Department of Soil Science. When Perry
Stout of Soil Science moved to Da\ is, the fund went to Davis with
him because he was administering the program.
247
Kendrick: My Administrative Advisory Committee, which consisted of the
deans and the directors, all agreed that we should try to change
the goal and administration of that foundation fund. We
conceived of a program which was unique, somewhat bold, and
continues to operate today. What we wanted to do was establish
five-year programs, with a different director for each program,
with a budget that consisted of the yield from the investments of
the foundation's funds. It was designed to be a mini-granting
agency. The only requirement was that the problem defined for
the five-year project be in soil science or related subjects.
The problem was to convince the existing director of the
Kearney Foundation, who was Professor Perry Stout, a long-time
Berkeley faculty member who had moved to Davis, that this was in
the best interests of the future of the Kearney Foundation. We
wanted to set up an advisory committee to select a problem, and
to suggest a director, and to then provide oversight during that
five-year period of the research activity. It all seemed like a
very fine idea at the time.
We were able to do that, without too much dust in the air.
Perry Stout cooperated beautifully, somewhat to the surprise of
many people. They thought that Perry was going to be too
possessive of his prerogative to run it, but he —
Lage: Had the funds been used previously to fund whatever the soil
scientists happened to be working on, and now you were going to
try to control the choice of research subjects a little bit more?
Kendrick: That's correct; that a good way to describe it. We thought it
had been confined a little too much to the departmental
activities and particular problems that Perry Stout felt were
important. We felt that we needed a broader base of input into
the direction of the overall program.
The technical advisory committee that we put together was
broadly representative of soil scientists and extension personnel
in the University of California. It selected nitrogen and its
fate in soil as the first five-year program, and identified as
the director for that five-year program, Don Nielsen, who is now
the senior associate dean in the College of Agriculture and
Environmental Sciences at Davis. We owe Don a lot of credit for
establishing the ground rules and the operational mode for the
moving five-year project which ha subsequently characterized the
foundation's program. An important aspect of the rules governing
the projects of the foundation is that none of the five-year
programs could be renewed for an additional five-year term. We
wanted to automatically interrupt potential dynasties.
248
Kendrick: Another stipulation was that we would not renew a director's
term. Each director had to be someone identified with the
current research problem.
Lage: What was the thought behind that?
Kendrick: Well, we just didn't want any single program to monopolize the
future, and we wanted to preserve the flexibility of the fund.
Another stipulation was that the headquarters for the foundation
would be on the campus of the selected director. So it could be
at Davis, or it could be at Riverside or Berkeley, wherever the
faculty home of the director was. And that, in fact, did happen.
The importance of that concept was that it was very difficult to
move resources from one campus to another, particularly regularly
budgeted funds. We gave the entire budget of the foundation to
the director and his advisors to administer in any way they
wanted to. So they could call for proposals and make research
grants.
Lage: They hired the staff on a five-year basis?
Kendrick: Yes. And then they use a certain amount of the support to wind
things up into a publication, or a workshop, or a symposium, or
what have you. The concept I had about continuing the program
was that, if it was of such current interest and importance to
the field of soil science, then other funding sources would move
in and take over. And, in fact, they did — the National Science
Foundation pursued a number of things in the nitrogen program.
Lage: And was the public presentation a part of it also — you mentioned
some kind of a workshop or — ?
Kendrick: It wasn't all that public, but this particular one ended up with
a two- or three-day symposium, a discussion of the results. But
there were ongoing contributions and publications. So it was
really quite a successful venture.
The next topic selected was a study of the fate of heavy
metals in the soil system. The director was Al [Albert] Page of
Riverside.
Lage: When you pick a director, do you look into their administrative
capabilities? It seems that you need certain talents that you
don't need to be a professor, in order to administer a granting
agency.
Kendrick: Well, I'll have to admit that that wasn't the primary
requirement. First and foremost, we picked someone who had a
reputation and knowledge of the subject matter. It turns out
that the people we've selected all have had reasonably good
competence in administering a program such as this, and of
249
Kendrick: course, there's enough money to provide some administrative
support. If you needed to augment the departmental staff so that
you'd have an administrative aide to take care of the ruts and
bolts of keeping track of the funds and other administrative
duties, that was possible.
Then the next five-year program was a soil-water salinity
program with John Letey at Riverside as the third five-year
director. He is a professor of soil science at Riverside.
Flexible Response to the Kesterson Crisis
Kendrick: We're into the fourth cycle now, so that we've just gotten
another program started, and the Kearney Foundation's program has
moved back to Davis with Kenneth Tanj i as the director. He came
on board just in time to inherit the Kesterson problem. What
pleased me most was that because of the importance of the
selenium accumulations and its toxicity in the Kesterson
reservoir, the director and the advisory committee delayed the
program of the Kearney Foundation one year and directed the
funding that would normally go into that program to study the
Kesterson situation.
Lage:
Kendrick:
**
The level of funding had reached, I think, three to four
hundred thousand dollars annually. This is a model that I really
think could serve the cause of flexibility well in the future.
Because we had this system in place when this Kesterson problem
came along and had not yet committed funds from the foundation
into the next five-year program, the decision could be made to
divert that first year's yield into the Kesterson situation and
problem. Ken Tanj i, who was the designated director of the
fourth five-year program for soil sciences, was also a co-leader
of the Kesterson research project.
But only one year spent on it, or — ?
That's the only year that I'm aware of that the foundation's
resources were diverted to that activity because we then went for
special appropriations for the solution to Kesterson. Rather
than having to wait a year to get some special appropriations,
here we had an opportunity to do what our external clientele had
been telling us to do, which was to reallocate from existing
funds. And the only way we had money available to do so was
because we had the foresight fifteen years earlier to increase
the flexibility of a significant amount of money which happily
was available to meet an emergency.
250
Kendrick: I think without that kind of a flexible funding, we would still
be waiting for the legislature to appropriate enough money to
divert people from existing commitments in their regular programs
into some of the research programs that were needed to address
the Kesterson problem. The Kesterson Waste Management group was
put together rather quickly as a task force. The director of the
experiment station and one of his assistants, who was his program
coordinator, assembled people in both the experiment station,
extension, and anybody else who had expressed an interest,
including the water center people, at a meeting to see what we
knew about the problem and what we could do about it. That waste
management task force was another one of the devices that was
used to mobilize for specific kinds of problems the resources of
the experiment station and extension into units that could
address those problems.
That same kind of technique had been used about fifteen
years earlier to form a committee of consultants for agricultural
water quality standards. When the water laws and water quality
control boards came into existence in the state of California,
one of the requirements of the legislation was for districts to
define their own water quality standards. I don't know just hew
many districts there are, but there are quite a few — maybe
fifteen, or twenty. And those water districts' boards were
composed of lay people, primarily, and some engineers. They
employed consultants to help them define what they needed to pay
attention to as far as defining standards for domestic water
quality within the district. But the boards found themselves
uninformed when they came to consider agricultural matters and
what agricultural waters did to water quality in general, as well
as what agricultural activities required as far as quality was
concerned. It's no secret that agricultural crops don't grow
well when water with high content of certain heavy metals or
salinity is used to irrigate them.
Some of the boards came to the University seeking help in
dealing with these matters that affected agriculture and water
quality. So we formed primarily within Cooperative Extension a
committee of consultants composed of knowledgeable people in
irrigation and water matters. Some experiment station people
were also included in the committee. The chief contributor and
leader of this activity was Bob Ayers, who was an extension
specialist in irrigation. Bob has since retired and is living in
Davis. That consultant group performed in a handsome manner,
contributing when called upon for the information needed to
establish water quality standards in those districts seeking
help.
So in a way, we had experience in assembling experts under
the direction of a coordinator to deal with problems that kind of
popped up unexpectedly with no real planning for them to be on
251
Kendrick: our active agenda. The Kesterson situation was handled in a
similar manner, but the problem was a little bit different, and
the solution is complex as well as difficult. Working in this
program has been complicated by the competing activities of
several federal and state agencies each with some responsibility
for regulating water use and runoff. So the task force is a
useful technique that has evolved to handle issues that are, as
I say, unpredictable, and sort of come at you in a hurry.
Slosson Fund for Ornamental Horticulture
Kendrick: One of the early-on unexpected funding augmentations of another
defined program of our organization was done in support of
ornamental horticulture. We had an extension specialist in
Cooperative Extension by the name of Harry Butterfield, long
since deceased. Harry was kind of a one-person encyclopedia of
ornamental horticulture, who worked very closely with garden club
organizations and people interested in gardens and urban plantings.
He provided a great deal of service, and I think he helped
organize the Garden Clubs of California into a state society.
In the course of doing that, one of the people whom he
helped was a widowed lady by the name of [Elvenia J.] Slosson.
Mrs. Slosson was the early founder of the California Garden Club
Association. Harry had worked closely with her for a good part
of his career. Well, the result of this good relationship was
that Mrs. Slosson left the University a million dollars to be
used to enhance the public's appreciation of ornamental
horticulture through both the research and extension. Since
Harry Butterfield was in extension, there was a strong
committment for using these funds to address the practical needs
of persons who were trying to enhance ornamental plants in an
urban setting.
Having a million dollars at my disposal was more than I'd
been accustomed to receiving. We set up the fund as an endowment
so that only the income from the million dollar investment was
available for the program. I appointed a committee to advise me
on how best to use this money. We started with the concept of a
Slosson Fellowship for which we would make a major grant on a
competitive basis to a member of the faculty for a period not to
exceed five years. The Slosson Fellows had an obligation to make
a useful contribution from their research program to practical
ornamental horticulture. The first Slosson fellow was Toshio
Murashige on the Riverside campus, who had a strong research
program in cultivating embryos of plants and freeing them of
viruses. This embryo transplant technique has become very widely
used in the ornamental nursery industry for propagating plants.
252
Kendrick: But in due course, the advisory committee became a little
disenchanted with granting all that money to one person; they
thought it would be more useful if we had a stronger extension
component and had grants to more people, so we changed the
methods and goals for the Slosson Fund. We dropped the Slosson
fellow concept and asked the Slosson Advisory Committee to deal
with grants and spread them around the system. So we have
another fund, like the Kearney Foundation for Soil Science, a
fund that supports defined programs. The advisory committee has
also adopted a five-year emphasis of particular programs within
the expanded topic of ornamental horticulture.
Mosquito Research Program; Broadening Decision-Making for a
Cooperative Effort
Kendrick: The mosquito research program was one that I inherited which had
had kind of a stormy existence because it had participants who
were interested in mosquito research for entirely different
reasons. The external group interested in what the University
was doing in mosquito control research were the managers of the
abatement districts. California is organized into mosquito
abatement districts, which are supported by local taxes. These
districts have as their goal the control of mosquitoes within
their boundaries. The manager is a locally employed person who
is charged with keeping the mosquitoes from annoying people and
transmitting diseases.
Another component group interested in mosquito research is
in the Department of Health Services, formerly called the
California Department of Public Health. And the Department of
Public Health had a unit in vector control monitoring and research
and also had a unit in research on the control of mosquitoes.
Another unit, not under the control or direction of the vice
president for agricultural sciences, was in our own faculties of
the two schools of public health, one at Berkeley and one at
UCLA. The two units outside of agriculture that were engaged in
mosquito research were interested in epidemiology in relationship
to the onset of malaria, sleeping sickness, and other mosquito-
borne diseases affecting public health.
Then we had within the experiment station in entomological
units at Berkeley, Davis, and Riverside, people who were doing
research in mosquito control, and mosquito epidemiology. That
unit was more or less directly under the program of the Division
of Agricultural Sciences. All of these diverse units had a
common interest^ but they were coming at it from a different
perspective.
253
Kendrick: Also there was some funding in the California Department of
Public Health for mosquito research that, before I became the
vice president, was moved to the University of California in
support of research because of some disenchantment by the
mosquito abatement district managers with the California
Department of Public Health. And there was some resentment, as
one might expect, in losing a program in the California
Department of Public Health to the University.
Another thing that sort of characterized mosquito research,
of which I became aware in due course, was that it was good news
media material. As far as public news media was concerned, we
seemed to constantly be discovering a promising new mechanism to
abate mosquito problems. And somehow or other, mosquito problems
continue to exist. The new method somehow wasn't really a
panacea for control; it wasn't as good as it promised to be. Our
researchers, however, continued to keep the public's interest
high on these new discoveries. That frustrated not only the
mosquito abatement district managers, but also people who paid
attention to research in mosquito abatement.
I began to wonder how I might bring all of this together and
have a cooperative program that would restore the confidence of
the district officers and the public in what would be perceived
to be a useful, needed program in mosquito research.
Lage: Were you getting complaints that made you turn your attention to
this?
Kendrick: Yes, I would hear from, particularly, the managers of the
districts. They were complaining about not receiving useful
information, and that it was not being made available to them.
It was an ongoing program, but it certainly was not well-
coordinated because the experiment station group was pursuing the
problem from their own perspective, and the public health groups
were doing research based on their needs.
I thought, once again, this calls for a committee,
[laughter] When in doubt, form a committee. But, as trite as it
sounds, it is really the only way to introduce different
perspectives into a common forum so you can begin to discuss what
those issues are and see if you can't arrive at some
accommodation for everybody's needs and wishes. So that was
done. I had all the parties that I just described represented on
this Mosquito Research Advisory Committee. And I chaired it, at
least initially.
I believed that what was really needed was someone who could
give the mosquito program full-time attention. One of the strong
persons who helped me organize was Bill Reeves, Professor Reeves,
of the School of Public Health in Berkeley; he is an
254
Kendrick: entomologist. He developed a career in mosquito research and the
epidemiology of the vector control. And I quickly determined.
and Bill and the committee also agreed, that we needed an
extension- type individual to coordinate all of the research and
to relate regularly with the abatement district managers. So we
brought a well- qualified person in from Colorado, whose name I
don't remember. That was the first step in putting a rationale
into the program. We added this coordinator to extension's
staff, but he didn't really function as a typical extension
person.
I told him that I wanted him to pay particular attention to
the various needs of the district people and to organize and
manage the granting part of the program. We had several hundred
thousand dollars to oversee and I wanted to be sure that the
money was going to programs that were of current interest and had
scientific validity. So in the experiment station, we asked the
entomologists to organize an entomology steering committee that
peer-evaluated the applications for funding from the mosquito
fund. The mosquito abatement district organization had a
research group in their organization which had a great interest
in the University's research program. I asked this group to
review the research proposals and to prioritize them according to
their views. Finally, the University Mosquito Research Advisory
Committee, which had representatives of all participating groups,
evaluated the requests and made the decisions concerning the
awards.
That format has continued. The original person, identified
as [laughs] — I like to call him the head mosquito — did much to
quiet the nervousness about the system. He worked very well with
both federal and state agencies and local district managers. We
were searching for another person to assume this role, and just
before I left office. Bruce Eldredge from Oregon was invited to
come down and assume an appointment in the experiment station
with the charge that mosquito research coordination was his
primary responsibility.
The major deficiency of the program, while I was associated
with it, was my inability to bring the locally-based Cooperative
Extension people into the program, even though a Cooperative
Extension position was assigned the responsibility for the
coordination of mosquito research. It was difficult to engage
the local county offices into mosquito problems, for reasons I'm
not sure I know. It always seemed to me that the locally-based
Cooperative Extension people were in a pretty good position to
work with mosquito control programs, particularly in rice-growing
regions. The rice-land water contributed a lot to the mosquito
problems in northern California. Many agricultural operations
also lead to mosquito production; waste water collections and the
like were a part of the problem.
255
Lage:
Why did you have trouble engaging Cooperative Extension?
Kendrick: I don't think the coordinator worked with Cooperative Extension
the same way other extension specialists did.
Lage: It wasn't necessarily resistance on the part of Cooperative
Extension?
Kendrick: No, I think it was the fact that the normal responsibility for
mosquito control rested with the abatement district managers.
They're the ones who have the contacts and who deal with the
local communities. I think it was a case where a public agency
had the primary responsibility for controlling mosquitoes so
Cooperative Extension did not have this program high on their own
agenda. I had no quarrel with that view, but I did expect
Cooperative Extension people to work with the abatement district
people when the mosquito problem was associated with an
agricultural practice.
ff
What I've been describing are mechanisms used to respond to
identified agricultural needs in an environment where there
really wasn't very much flexibility in the ongoing appropriations
from state and federal sources. The fundamental research program
in the experiment station is the aggregation of many projects
where something in the order of twelve hundred to fifteen hundred
projects are active at any one time. But this array of research
projects are categorized into a classification system so that you
can increasingly aggregate the projects of the experiment station
into broader and broader caregories, such as pest and disease
control, or agricultural production, or nutrition. So for the
purposes of administrative convenience you could say that 60
percent of all resources were going into agriculture production
kinds of activities and maybe 5 to 10 percent were expended for
nutritional quality kinds of programs.
Those kinds of statistics get you into as much trouble as
they do in providing an understanding of where your funding is
being expended because special interest groups have different
points of view relative to whether or not you were
overemphasizing or underemphasizing particular programs by the
allocations of resources.
Lage: If you make someone happy, you're bothering someone else.
Kendrick: And there is a lack of understanding that in order to shift
resources, I had to shift people. It's not easy to shift an
agricultural engineer into the program of labor relations. You
make essentially a lifetime commitment to a person when you
employ them in a ladder position on the faculty of the
256
Kendrick: Agricultural Experiment Station, and you make a similar lifetime
commitment to the career of the person in extension. Even though
tenure is not a part of the Cooperative Extension system, it's
pretty secure employment as long as the individual remains
productive and active.
That's just another way of saying that there's not a lot of
flexibility to adjust your programs quickly once you make those
commitments. The only way to have flexibility is to have a
broadly-based continuously employed staff so that you can call
upon particular specialists when a problem emerges, unless you're
talking about a long-term basic research program, such as in
biotechnology or in toxic waste management and the like. Ajid the
techniques I've described are ways of utilizing a little bit of
money that becomes available to make specific grants to
individuals to buy their time and attention away from an already
busy schedule into a focused research and extension program that
has some practical utilization in agriculture and natural
resource problem areas.
Most of the faculty and staff are busy and fully committed.
You have to interest them in doing what you want them to do, at
the expense of disinteresting them in doing what they want to do,
and for which they already may have some funding support
available. The problem is accentuated if you are dealing with a
particularly skillful research worker who has oodles of money
from the National Science Foundation, or the National Institutes
of Health, or some other granting agency. You must interest that
person in, for instance, the problem of selenium accumulation in
the ground water system in the Kesterson region if he or she is a
person who has the skills you need to work on that particular
problem. After arousing the person's interest you must then have
resources available to support whatever effort that person can
devote to the problem. Well, that's not all that easily done.
But the techniques I've described were successfully applied ar.d
did diversify our program in research when these particular kinds
of problems arose.
San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Research and Extension Center
A UC Program for the San Joaquin Valley
Kendrick: One of the things that was established early on was the San
Joaquin Valley Agricultural Research and Extension Center,
located at the Kearney Horticultural Field Station, one of our
nine agricultural field stations, located near Parlier, about
twenty miles southeast of Fresno. This was a concept to increase
257
Kendrick: the visibility and activity of research and extension in the San
Joaquin Valley by assigning academic and extension people to that
center. It was in contrast to our other field stations, which
merely provided facilities for research. This was a modest
attempt to respond to the long-time yearning of the San Joaquin
Valley interests for a campus of the University of California in
their area.
So there were experiment station personnel and extension
specialists located in augmented physical facilities at Kearney.
It is a difficult concept to understand; those of us
administering it could understand it, but the external community
certainly couldn't see the difference in activity between a field
station and a center. It was really quite different because we
had departmental members from Berkeley, Davis, and Riverside, as
well as extension specialists assigned to the center. Presently,
there are about eighty people at this center, and we've shortened
the name to the Kearney Agricultural Center. The center has
buildings of its own, the most recent of which is under
construction costing about five million dollars, to provide more
research space. The center is administered by an executive
committee of three persons and it will address agricultural
problems characteristic of the San Joaquin Valley. We wanted to
make it a true agricultural research and extension center for the
Valley.
Lage : It sounds somewhat similar to what the Citrus Experiment Station
might have been initially.
Kendrick: That shows how well you are grounded in the background with
agriculture. You are precisely right. It is in a sense an early
edition of what the Citrus Experiment Station was originally.
The difficulty of staffing the Kearney Agricultural Center
with academic personnel is that once they're located away from a
campus, their future promotions and advancements become more
difficult. They are removed from day-to-day contacts with their
colleagues on the campuses, who will ultimately sit in judgment
of the quality of their work. Moreover, until you have a
critical mass of people representing several disciplines, and a
library, and a few students around, it is difficult to be a real
self-starter and perform in a manner that is deemed acceptable by
the University of California in these non-campus areas. That's
the primary reason why we've never located very many people from
the academic community at these field stations; instead, we have
kept them as facilities for campus-based people to conduct their
research on a need basis.
But the Kearney Agricultural Center still has the potential
for being another Citrus Experiment Station. In my judgment, it
really depends on whether or not the ultimate funding and the
258
Kendrick: numbers of people associated with it will become sufficiently
large to become a unit of its own, with its own budget and
ability to determine its own destiny. There are people who think
it may, and there are people who think that the nature of the
University's advancement system is such that it mitigates against
its ever becoming anything other than an expanded field station
facility.
I think that the real challenge is to develop an
academically acceptable program at Kearney without trying to
convince the regular campus-based faculty that they could operate
at the Kearney Agricultural Center effectively and still protect
their future. I proposed that we try locating at the center a
post-doctoral cadre of people who have term appointments and who
realize that they would not be there for their entire career.
Such an arrangement would provide an opportunity to the post
doctoral person to gain experience in practical problems
associated with agriculture. They could conduct research in an
environment where the public would be watching them doing things
that they thought were important, and they would have an
opportunity to relate directly with the agricultural clientele.
I think the concept is worthy of trial because it would provide a
period of internship for future agricultural research people
without committing to long-term employment of permanent
personnel.
Locating extension specialists there is less of a problem
because their kinds of activities are precisely those that are
deemed to be of practical nature, and their advancement does not
suffer by their activities at such a center. And as long as
there are enough academic people there, they don't lose touch
with or the stimulation of associations with academic colleagues.
So the commitment of an augmentation to the facility, I
think, is something that President Gardner was interested in
pursuing because we really hadn't had very good visibility as far
as the total University of California was concerned. In spite of
much agricultural activity by the University, it's been somewhat
diversified. It needs to be more visible and perhaps more
coordinated to receive the attention it deserves. The
University's program visibility is important because we have
Fresno State University in that same region. The agricultural
people at Fresno State are constantly suggesting that they're the
ones who are addressing the practical problems of agriculture,
and that the University is only interested in basic research and
therefore has withdrawn from those things that the agricultural
community deems important.
Well, that's not true. But impressions and perceptions are
what build budgets and persuade appropriating agencies, so
there's more than just pride at stake here. We need a broader-
259
Kendrick: based recognition of the agricultural programs of the University
of California in the San Joaquin Valley and an active support of
their value and importance. We've had good support from that
area in the past, and that we cannot treat lightly. It will go
away if the politicians and their supporters perceive that we're
too purely academic to address the practical problems of
agriculture in the region.
Whether the concept of a Kearney Agricultural Center
develops fruitfully or not I think is problematical. It has a
budget of its own which is separate from the field station
budget. I was involved with a special appropriation request from
the state for the center early on in my vice presidency. I had
to help shepherd it through the legislature. We started out
again with about a half a million dollar request and wound up
with about half of that amount.
Administrative Changes
Lage : So this goes way back.
Kendrick: This goes back to 1968-69. The administration of the center has
undergone several administrative changes. The biggest boost the
center received was when I asked Bill [William B.] Hewitt, who
was a professor of plant pathology, to direct the center's
program. He had been the chair of the Department of Plant
Pathology and a few years before he retired wanted to move from
Davis. He thought that this would be a good opportunity to do
something worthwhile so he accepted the appointment as director
of the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Research and Extension
Center. I also gave him the title of an assistant director of
the Agricultural Experiment Station and he became a part of my
administrative counsel.
Under Bill's direction the center functioned pretty well as
a unit. Bill was a vigorous administrator, a person who
perceived the importance of the program in the area. He stepped
on a few toes and irritated a few people because he had no
tolerance for unproductiveness and slovenliness. But he gave it
a good deal of visibility.
Lage: How did he do with the local community?
Kendrick: They thought he was fine. He met with them regularly, and he was
sympathetic to their needs, and they perceived that the
University was interested in their problems. The irritations
were from the University people whom he was trying to push and
direct into productive activity.
260
Lage: People on the staff.
Kendrick: On the staff. But I have to give Bill a lot of credit. We
haven't had that kind of vigororous leadership for this program
since his retirement. The last director of the center didn't
work out very well, and he has resigned. The center is now run
by a committee.
Lage: [laughs] The ubiquitous committee.
Kendrick: The ubiquitous committee. The local academic staff in both
extension and research have agreed to follow the method of
designating department chairs on a campus. The dean usually
consults with the departmental members about whom they might like
to be their chair. If a majority of the people agree on one of
the dean's suggestions, that person is likely to be chosen as the
chair. If the majority of the people say, "Under no
circumstances would we work with that person," the chances are
pretty slim that the dean would appoint that person because it's
rather crucial to have somebody as the leader of a department who
has the respect and support of the membership of the department.
So that's the way in which the academic unit at Kearney is being
administered presently.
The manager of the local field station has a busy agenda of
his own, just keeping the management of the property and the
crops going. That person receives a certain amount of public
attention by the nature of his position. At Kearney that person
is Fred Swanson, who is a capable person and who cooperates well
with the academic chair. Now, just to complicate the picture, we
have the regional director of Cooperative Extension also located
at Kearney. The regional director of all the Cooperative
Extension programs in the central San Joaquin Valley and the
central coastal region is Bill Hambelton. So we have three admini
strative people on the committee who have administrative responsi
bilities for the activities of the center, and in the Valley.
Following Bill Hewitt's retirement, I perceived that having
three people with split responsibilities was an impossible way to
administer, so I made an impossible assignment to one person,
[laughs] Andy Deal, who was an extension specialist in
entomology, located at the Kearney center, was made the regional
director of Cooperative Extension, and I decided to appoint him
director of the field station and director of the Kearney
Agricultural Center in addition. So he bore the brunt of being
administratively responsible for three diverse activities and ran
himself ragged. He did a very credible job of trying to keep all
this coordination going, but he had a very different personality
than Bill Hewitt. Bill was very blunt and candid about things.
and Andy tended to not disagree or be disagreeable, and so there
was a different kind of leadership in that era.
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Kendrick: When Andy retired we looked for another Bill Hewitt type and
found him, [laughs], and he quickly alienated a lot of the people
whom he should not have — not on purpose; he was just a misfit.
So then by mutual agreement he stepped aside. And now we're back
to the administration by committee. I think that's not
necessarily how it will ultimately be resolved, but my successor
is going to see how it functions before he makes another move.
The Future of Cooperative Extension: Regional Centers?
Kendrick: In the long-term plan, we have two other agricultural centers
that we were trying to bring into being. One is in Imperial
County, where we had hoped to locate both extension and research
activities at the Meloland Field Station to serve Imperial Valley
and desert agriculture in general. We had planned to move the
Imperial County Cooperative Extension staff to that center.
That plan ran into some political problems with the county
board of supervisors. County-based Cooperative Extension must be
supported by county budgets, and we had several members of the
board of supervisors who were unenthusiastic about financially
supporting Cooperative Extension at a university facility.
Lage: What were they afraid of?
Kendrick: Well, in the first place. Imperial County was extremely poor.
It's in one of the depressed areas of California, and it really
didn't have much money left to make any long-term commitments to
non-mandated programs, but the concept of county support is
essential for Cooperative Extension. There was a particularly
irate member of the board of supervisors who really — I think if
the truth were known — wanted the location of Cooperative
Extension and the agricultural commissioner at a center located
in a different place, somewhat removed from the University of
California.
The University of California is not an endearing institution
to everybody in the state; it's regarded as arrogant in some
places and irresponsible in others, and they cite evidence that
sustains their points of view. So that Imperial County
Agricultural Center, I think, is still up in the air. The
Cooperative Extension personnel in Imperial County are now
located in old county buildings, and whether or not they get
moved is not very soon to be resolved. It's one of the problems
I left my successor.
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Kendrick: The other area where we were trying to develop the concept of an
agricultural center was with the USDA [U.S. Department of
Agriculture] in the Salinas area. We are pursuing, I think
still, without bringing it into being, an agricultural center for
the central coast. Not just for Monterey County, or not just for
the Salinas Valley, but the whole coastal area, which has an
agricultural characteristic of its own. The USDA has a research
center located in Salinas that gives attention to lettuce
breeding and some agricultural mechanization studies. They have
a nice facility there, and we were negotiating with them for the
location of a University operated field station and the Monterey
Cooperative Extension program at the same location. Such a
development would be identified as an agricultural research and
extension center for the central coast region of California.
Lage: You worked with USDA, then?
Kendrick: Yes; we were negotiating with them on that concept. That still
is possible, in my judgment, but it kind of depends upon the
status of the economic picture. There's a lot of willingness,
but there has to be some accommodation over jurisdiction. That
always rears its head, about who controls, or who's going to be
in charge. So just about the time you get all the ducks in
order, the USDA changes its local leadership, and we have to go
through negotiations all over again. But it's my view that these
regional centers are apt to be ultimately viable, and there will
be more of them, and they will be largely staffed by extension.
I think extension's role in each county will become diminished as
the budgets become more difficult to be achieved, and the
problems that extension will address will be really more global
and more diffuse than specific how-to kinds of questions that
have been the traditional menu of extension activities. How soon
that might happen, I don't know, but I really believe that
extension's future is going to be sustained only if they
aggregate themselves into regional areas rather than county-
centered offices.
The downside of that regional organization is that you lose
local support. So one should not just ignore that downside
issue, unless you're prepared to support the regional centers
from some other source — if you cut back and have it supported
through your federal and state funds in a way that compensates
for the losses that you're going to achieve by moving out of the
local situations.
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Integrated Pest Management Program
A New Concept of Disease and Insect Control
Kendrick: There are three other programs I'd like to cover before we end
this session, and they all resulted from augmented funding. The
reason they are viable is because they did receive special
appropriations. They are the Integrated Pest Management [IPM]
Program, the Wildlands Research Center, and the Agricultural
Sustainability Program.
Let's go back to the IPM program first because it represents
an attempt to promote a different concept of disease and insect
control, a changed emphasis from what had been the traditional
way of looking at control on a piecemeal basis by plant
pathologists and entomologists. The integrated pest management
term was introduced by the entomologists and was intended to
incorporate biological control as a tactic in the control of
pests. It was a perfectly sound concept because what they
intended to do was to model plant growth in addition to studying
insect life cycles, a fairly new concept as far as entomologists
were concerned.
The introduction of modeling of plant growth and studying
the plant's susceptibility to particular kinds of damage by
insects was first developed most completely by studying cotton,
cotton insects, and cotton insect control. By modeling and
understanding what influenced various stages of cotton growth and
when the bolls and the blossoms were most susceptible to attack
by insect pests, treatments could be targeted to just the
susceptible periods. This improved information did much to
reduce the amount of insecticides applied to plants as a
protective measure. So the IPM concept was beginning to develop
as a practical means of control in the early 1970s.
Lage: Was it a reaction in part to the environmental concerns, or to
the loss of pesticide effectiveness?
Kendrick: Well, both. I think it was certainly not hindered by the
concerns about contamination of the environment. Its development
was made possible because of the computer. The introduction of
computers into the research program was crucial. With the amount
of information accumulated on growth of plants and pests and the
effects of factors in the environment such as temperature and
moisture on their growth and development, measured as often as
each day for the life of the plant, you can get a basement full
of data that you can't handle with a hand calculator and a
pencil. With the introduction of the computer, you've got a
capacity to store that information and regurgitate it in a way
264
Kendrick: that you can run correlations and find out what is or is not
significant. Without the computer, development of the IPM
program would have floundered. So concern for the environment.
concern for toxics, and the evident loss of effectiveness by a
number of widely used insecticides because of the resistance of
certain insect populations — all congealed at the right time.
The concept of bringing all this epidemiological information
together for analysis was certainly not a new concept — plant
pathologists had done it most of their lives. When I described
my earlier program in the control of bean root rot, I think I
said I tried everything I could think of to try to eliminate bean
root rot — that is, change varieties, alter planting dates, and
apply fungicides to the soil — that's all IPM too. It's bringing
every facet of information to bear that you can possibly
accumulate relative to the plant, the insect, or the plant
pathogen, and see whether in that relationship there's a weak
link. You may be able to target that and interrupt the sequence
of disease or insect damage.
Lage: Does it tend to be a team approach?
Kendrick: It has to be a team approach. One person cannot master all the
specialities required because you've got to have crop
specialists, plant pathologists, entomologists, weed control
specialists, together with perhaps the toxicologists and
biostatisticians working together.
I determined that we really needed to put some money into
this program, so I asked some well-established entomologists and
plant pathologists to design an IPM program. This occurred in the
early 1970s. Nothing useful arrived on my desk in terms of a propo
sal, and I was frustrated as well as disappointed in my colleagues.
I concluded that I had asked the wrong people to do this
job. So I decided that I needed a committee of young people
whose careers were ahead of them to address this problem and
design how they might like to see it put together. I appointed a
committee headed by Andy Gutierrez, a professor of entomology or.
the Berkeley campus in the Division of Biological Control. He is
a computer expert and systems analyst. He chaired this effort
with representatives from Davis, Riverside, and Berkeley. In a
short period of time, they produced a very useful and workable
report. It became the basis for the establishment of the IPM
program. I was seeking a program that I could take to the
legislature and request funding for its support.
I have to describe Andy as irreverant and outspoken in his
relationships with his colleagues. He was pretty outspoken about
discrimination, very outspoken about what he thought was the
second-class citizenship of biological control people.
265
Lage: So he came out of a biological control orientation?
Kendrick: Yes. He was the disciple of Robert van den Bosch. I think some
people were surprised that I asked him to chair the committee,
but he certainly responded in great fashion to the charge. I
think he also saw an opportunity for [laughs] biological control
to emerge from the shadows into the forefront of IPM. But he was
very helpful and his concept was sound.
With some modifications. I then went forward with a
proposal. I made some modifications concerning the
representation on the advisory committees and technical
committees, all of which was screened through my Administrative
Advisory Council. I talk like a lot of this was all done by me.
That's not true —
Lage: Was the initial idea for this integrated pest management program
yours, or did someone else come forth — ?
Kendrick: Well, as I say, the basic concept of IPM was entomological. It
was already in existence; I was just thinking that I wanted to
broaden it into a UC program and get some state funding behind
it. I wanted it not just to be entomological, but I wanted it to
include plant pathology and weeds as well. While IPM was
conceived as an insect management program, I knew that plant
pathology also had a place in an integrated pest management
program. If I'd had the opportunity to go further with it, I
would have changed the terminology so that it would have been
known as an integrated plant health program, without identifying
a particular threat to plant health. But the nomenclature was
fixed. IPM was the wave of the future, and I caught that wave
and tried to ride it.
Developing Budgetary Support in the Jerry Brown Administration
Kendrick: Well, I proposed a program with a manager, the director of the
IPM program, much like we had with the Kearney Foundation for
Soil Sciences. We'd had that experience, and since it was
successful we wanted to set IPM up with the same level of
administrative arrangement.
So we went to the governor and the legislature — it was
during the Saxon administration — requesting a five— year
augmentation of our budget so that we end up with a five million
dollar annual appropriation. We proposed starting with a couple
of a million dollars to get it off the ground.
«
266
Kendrick: Now, I recall that this requested augmentation occurred around
the time I was having trouble with the legislature about allega
tions of inattention to the small farmers, discrimination against
Hispanic employees, and farm labor displacement by mechanization
research, so there was a lot of unhappiness in that body. Along
comes this proposal to augment our budget to pursue an IPM program.
Well, much to my surprise, I received support from all quarters for
this program. It came from environmentally concerned organizations,
it came from the chemical industry, and it came from agriculture —
you couldn't have asked for a more diverse group of special inter
ests to come together to support this program. It also came at a
time when the Department of Food and Agriculture was faced with
increasing difficulties in policing the use of agricultural chem
icals. This was during Rich Rominger's directorship of the Depart
ment of Food and Agriculture, and Jerry Brown was the governor.
I remember meeting with representatives of both the
Legislative Analyst's Office and the Department of Finance during
the formation of the governor's budget, and we were receiving the
usual comments about, "Why do you need additional money for the
program?" I said, "Well, it's not a case of need as much as it
is a case of urgency. We'll continue to work in this program
with our present resources." We had just completed work and had
published a pear pest and disease manual. It had taken about ten
years of work by several extension workers and experiment station
people. I said, "We probably can cover one crop about every ten
years. If that's the way you want this program to operate, we'll
continue to do so. But if you want it accelerated, if you want
us to cover more crops as we propose to do, then it's going to
take this amount of money." That tactic really worked. It was
put on the basis of, "I don't need it, but you're the ones who
are after me to do it, so if you want me to do it, it really is
going to require some augmentation of our budget."
Rich Rominger was totally supportive of the program. He
knew that we needed alternative means of addressing the insect
and pesticide problems of the state. The Department of Finance
went along with it but said the governor would have to decide
whether he wished to support it. That's when I had the brief
exchange with Jerry Brown and Rich Rominger at a luncheon meeting
in San Diego at which the governor was a featured speaker. We
had a three-minute conversation with him, in which he asked Rich
if it was an important program, and Rich said, "Yes, it certainly
is. Our future really depends upon the University being able to
do effective work in this area." And the governor said, "Okay,
we'll do it." That's the way the IPM budget was launched into
the political process.
Lage : You mentioned different interest groups that supported it. Did
you or your staff contact the lobbyists for the.se interest groups
to get their support?
267
Kendrick: Yes. When we were designing the program, the Environmental
Defense Fund, for instance, was a significant group that
supported it. We made certain that they were aware of what we
weie proposing. They didn't have input in the design of the
program but were represented later on the policy advisory
committee, which was created to permit all the interested parties
to stay in touch with the program.
Lage : So you were kind of bringing in a new support group.
Kendrick: The reason that broad-based support was there was because each of
the diverse groups saw that the program supported their
individual goals. The agricultural chemical industry knew that
they were ultimately going to have to have a justification for
the use of agricultural chemicals in controlling pests and
diseases in a more enlightened manner. The people who advocated
no use of agricultural chemicals in the control of diseases and
pests perceived that integrated pest management was going to
result in a program that would replace those chemicals by
biological control methods. The people who were concerned about
environmental quality expected that IPM methods would result in
the reduction in the amount of chemicals released into the
environment. We proposed to study first those crops on which
there was a high usage of pesticides to see if we could reduce
the pesticide load in the environment.
So the program didn't have very tough sledding; it got
pruned back a little bit from our original request for support.
But it emerged with a million dollars of support, and that was a
big augmentation for the agricultural budget, at a time when all
the other noise of discontent and criticism was taking place.
The IPM was proposed at just the right time to obtain the broad-
based political support that it needed to be successfully
defended in both the executive and legislative branches of
government. It was well designed and had universally acceptable
goals.
The IPM program was run by a director. Ivan Thomason was
the first director, and Ivan was succeeded by Jim [James M.]
Lyons. Ivan is at Riverside. He was an ideal director to
develop the program. Ivan was trained as a plant pathologist,
but his professional career developed as a nemotologist.
Lage: Did you appoint these people with advice and faculty input?
Kendrick: Yes. Everything involved advice and consent. Ivan was a natural
choice from among a number of qualified people. I won't describe
the techniques of how the IPM program was put together, but it
involved a lot of people as advisors, and an advisory committee
for each crop studied. These studies have resulted in some
handsome and comprehensive publications. That's one of the best
268
Kendrick: things that happened with the IPM program. It published manuals.
They're called IPM manuals, and they're probably the most popular
publications we've put out in the last decade. So it was a good
success story and a model to follow.
Wildland Resources Center
Kendrick: Now, the Wildland Resources Center has existed on the books for
a long time. I think Henry Vaux, Sr., originally conceived the
need and put it together. I made several stabs at trying to
identify and sharpen up the goals of the program by getting all
interested parties together to put together a defined program.
It had a modest annual appropriation of $15,000 split between the
Berkeley and Davis campuses that didn't permit any significant
research effort. The center was barely functional.
It was originaly proposed, I think, probably at an
inopportune time as far as the budget was concerned because it
came when we were suffering from proposed budget cuts prior to my
arrival on the scene. We could never get the program put
together in a way that was sexy enough to appeal to a legislative
group. It wasn't a crisis kind of a program — IPM was essentially
a response to a crisis. Wildlands — everybody's for them, but
nothing easily defined seems to threaten their existence in the
public's mind.
Lage: It was a popular concern in the seventies.
Kendrick: Yes, but they didn't have a well-organized constituency. Their
problems are like deferred maintenance; i.e., other urgent crisis
problems replace them in the budgets.
So I really couldn't get much interest internally in an
augmented wildlands research budget, until Harold Walt was
appointed chairman of the State Board of Forestry at the
beginning of the Deukmejian administration. (He has a background
from Walt's Drugs here in Berkeley.) He's a very vigorous and
effective politician who decided that he wanted to do something
for forestry research. He was politically well placed with the
governor and very persistent. The Department of Forestry and the
State Board of Forestry organized a centennial program, a two-
year program of laying the groundwork for a significant
augmentation of the University's and the Department of Forestry's
programs in forestry and wildlands. This was an opportune time
for us to join this external political influence and get
something in our budget for these overlooked programs. That
happened. We put together a program based largely on some of the
early studies. I appeared at one of the centennial meetings in
269
Kendrick: Yosemite with Henry Vaux, Sr.. in which I said that the
University was prepared to address these needs, that we certainly
supported the augmentation of the budget.
Well, the long and the short of this is that President
Gardner wasn't all that enthusiastic about funding this program
at this time because of some other University priorities, but
Harold Walt was. I arranged for him to visit with the President,
where he pressed his point. I also worked with Vice President
Baker, our budget officer, pointing out how much political
support and interest there was in the program, and how much good
we could do ourselves by having a visible program in this area.
We certainly had the support to bring it through the legislature.
I knew we'd do ourselves more harm by turning our back upon that
support than we would by accepting it and placing the request in
our budget. So it got into the budget, and it was supported.
We then appointed Robert Callaham director for the Wildland
Resources Program, a former USDA Forestry research director, on a
half-time basis. He began to mobilize, organize, and coordinate
the activities. He is a little abrasive with people under him,
but he certainly is a vigorous individual who has entre into the
total resources of the University in addressing the problems of
wildlands.
Lage: This has also become sort of a granting agency?
Kendrick: Yes. It's a granting agency. Again, making grants on a
specific, relatively short-term basis, so we don't commit funds
into perpetuity. That is absolutely essential in these programs
if we're going to keep ourselves current.
Well, I've lost track of exactly what the status of it is
now. I know that this was the first significant augmentation of
money in support of wildland and forestry problems in a long, long
time. I felt gratified in being able to bring that to bear
because it was certainly an area that needed attention, and I
couldn't light the spark until Harold Walt came along.
Lage: Interesting, especially since Henry Vaux, Sr., was his
predecessor [as chairman of the State Board of Forestry] , and he
was vitally interested in forestry research.
Kendrick: Yes. Henry is a dear friend of mine, and one of the most
competent elder statesmen and professors I've ever known in this
area, and also, as you mentioned, a former chairman of the State
Board of Forestry. But I think Henry would be the first to admit
that he's not the politician that Harold Walt is. There is no
doubt in my mind that this program is underway today because of
the political influence that Walt was able to exert, particularly
in the Governor's Office and at the Department of Finance. The
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Kendrick: Department of Finance wasn't all that enthusiastic about putting
this kind of money into wildland research when they had other
crisis topics in need of money. But Harold called in his
political chips of support for the governor.
I didn't kid myself for one moment that logic would prevail
in any of this. I had to be ready with the appropriate program
at the opportune time and seize the opportunity and run with it.
If you're not ready with the likes of an IPM program, or a
wildlands research center, or a mosquito research program, or
what have you, when the political snowball is set in motion, then
forget it. You're not necessarily going to sell programs on a
logical basis. The Agricultural Issues Center, on the other
hand, was a program proposal based on the logic of need. I think
its modest funding is a result of the lack of overwhelming
political support. If agriculture had been more enthusiastically
supportive we could have easily doubled its state support.
Lage: So this gets back to the question on this sort of generalized
outline [for the interview series] on how the mission is defined.
Kendrick: [laughs] I guess it does. The mission is defined by the
external environment, to a large extent, and the capacity of the
division to mobilize and to respond to it. And the only way I
found to mobilize it is to put money into a program leader's
hands and let the leader direct the program. In most of these
program initiatives the work of Lowell Lewis, my assistant vice
president and director of the Agricultural Experiment Station,
was indispensible. He carried out most of the "leg-work"
required.
Sustainable Agriculture Program
Serving Small-Scale and Organic Farmers ##
Kendrick: The last program I want to talk about that arrived with another
political opportunity is the Sustainable Agriculture Program.
It came into fruition at the very end of my administration. It
is now, as I understand it, perking along in pretty good shape,
but the program initially developed largely because of a high
level of criticism that the traditional programs in agriculture
ignored the needs of this group of participants in the
agricultural scene.
Characteristic of representatives of this group are very
small farmers, farmers of crop specialties with a limited
distribution. Many of them market their products directly in
271
Kendrick: health-food stores, or in natural food outlets in regular
supermarkets, or directly at farmers' markets. A lot of them
operate in response to the needs of specialty restaurants that
make a point of not serving food that has any identifiable
chemical additives to their products.
Lage: So they are organic farmers?
Kendrick: The organic farming enthusiasts have an organization, a national
organization. The most renowned representative of that point of
view is the Rodale Farm in Pennsylvania. The Rodale Press is
probably the principal source of published items that address
organic farming.
Admittedly, that is the group of farm people in California
whom our extension program really didn't pay a lot attention to.
Extension's attitude was that we're available to help if they
want us, but if they don't come and get us, why that's their
problem. We did have an aggressive program for small farmers
which included an information center and we also staffed our
extension program with several small-farm advisors —
Lage: Now, were these programs long-standing or initiated during your
administration?
Kendrick: This program came into being during my administration when Jerry
[Jerome] Siebert was the associate director of Cooperative
Extension. He was instrumental in developing the concept of
assistance for limited resource farmers who often were not
literate in English. It was implemented in response to the
general criticism that we weren't paying enough attention to the
needs of the small farmer. Also, we filled these small-farm
advisors' positions with bilingual people, who were not just
Spanish-speaking, but were of Hispanic origin. They found
themselves working with agricultural cooperatives as well as
people struggling to set up farms of their own in which they had
some independence. So it wasn't a case of ignoring those needs;
but we weren't really dealing with the organic farm groups.
Lage: I would think all these small farmers wouldn't necessarily be
organic farmers.
Kendrick: No, they're not. They're small because they're economically
incapable of starting very large. Small farming, organic
farming, and sustainable agriculture were the sources of another
editorial I wrote [California Agriculture. July-August, 1985], in
which I tried to point out just the point that you were making,
that the program was not a synonym for the organic farming
philosophy. I said also that sustainable agriculture certainly
was not a program that I thought was incompatible with what I
thought the agricultural research and extension program at the
272
Kendrick: University had been about all the time. We were not interested
in developing recommendations that were going to result in the
extinction of agriculture. I pointed out that some abuses and
misuses in agricultural practices had resulted in environmental
deterioration, but that had not been the intention of all the
research. I also suggested that organic farming had to
demonstrate its economic feasibility in both production and
marketing before it would become a generally accepted practice.
Legislative and Public Input to the Program
Kendrick: Again, some of our biological control people were advocates of
this program, because they're generally the nonchemical
proponents of agricultural production. Strong interest in the
program developed in Senator [Nicholas] Petris's office. Senator
Petris is one of three members of the Senate Finance Committee's
subcommittee that reviews the University's budget. Senator
Petris's staff was quite interested in the University's diverting
their funds and their interest into what was called "sustainable
agriculture programs," perceived and interpreted another way:
nonchemical farming.
Well, Senator Petris's interest in anything the University
is doing is not to be ignored. So we probably gave the program a
good deal more attention than we would have ordinarily. We were
asked to conduct some hearings to determine what the need really
was. Robert Peyton was employed by Lowell Lewis to hold public
hearings and listen to people complain about what the University
was or wasn't doing to help them.
Lage: These were Petris's hearings?
Kendrick: No, no. These were conducted by us.
Lage: Was this something new?
Kendrick: Well, we wouldn't ordinarily conduct public hearings, in that
fashion. It was a new twist of listening to a client group who
felt that they were disadvantaged and not paid attention to. We
made a gallant effort to do so.
Lage: When was this?
Kendrick: It was done in '85. This procedure was encouraged by Petris's
office. He was more than just casually interested in our doing
that sort of thing and encouraged us to do it.
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Kendrick: The public hearings resulted in a report and a summary. An
external committee was put together on sustainable agriculture,
with representatives of the organized groups and Senator Petris's
office. Robert Peyton, as I said, was the person we employed to
oversee the development of the program, and he was just
absolutely the right person. He had the "patience of Job" to sit
and listen to the many witnesses. Hearings were held in about
four different locations in the state. Everybody felt that he
was fair and would listen to their complaints for as long as they
wanted to express them. I had many, many hours of discussion
with Robert and said, "Don't turn anybody off. We want to give
everybody ample time to voice their complaints." Some of them
were kind of abusive and pretty hard to listen to. But he
performed with good humor as the university's hearing officer.
Lage: It was a multi-session hearing?
Kendrick: That's right, and it was all transcribed by a court reporter.
Well, let me say without going into more detail that the
hearings resulted in a proposal for an augmented budget for the
University's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources to
conduct a program in sustainable agriculture. It was another
case where we persuaded President Gardner that it was politically
advisable to include it in the University's budget, particularly
since Senator Petris was going to impose something of his own on
us if we did not propose something that was at least compatible
with our existing programs.
We also had an internal academic advisory committee, which
worked quite well with the external groups. The academic
committee was charged with the responsibility of designing the
program. President Gardner accepted my recommendation, and it
made its way through the Department of Finance, to the governor
and the legislature, and was sustained. I'm not sure just how
much money ultimately was appropriated because it occurred just
at the time that I retired. I think the proposal was for about a
million dollars. At least that's the amount we were talking
about at the time. It provided, again, for the employment of a
director of the program.
Lage: That seems to be an essential ingredient.
Kendrick: Yes, in the environment in which we operate, it is. These
program directors are responsible to the director of the
Agricultural Experiment Station, so even though the director has
overall responsibility for all programs, it is necessary for
somebody to give full-time attention to these particular
programs, and sustain them, and be concerned about them.
Lage: Now, will that address problems of small farmers overall?
274
Kendrick: Yes.
Lage: Not just organic.
Kendrick: Yes. all small farmers. It's not just an organic fanner program.
Lage: But you will address those needs too?
Kendrick: Certainly. It has an advisory committee with external membership
which sits in judgment of the program and its research. It also
has an internal faculty and extension advisory group, who try to
keep the program academically acceptable. A lot of things that
the people on the outside think the University ought to do are
just not appropriate to University activities and ought to be
done by somebody else. You have to be certain that sort of
distinction is understood and carried out; you can't allow the
University's program to become less than University stature. The
misunderstanding of that incites some of the comments that the
University is arrogant. It's not arrogance at all; it's trying
to keep the program in the right direction, in the right context.
Dr. William Liebhardt was appointed director of this
program. He was formerly director of research at Rodale, and he
came through a search and screening process that is typical of
our usual ways of seeking the most qualified person to fill a
position. I think this appointment went a long way to
demonstrate to our skeptics that our commitment to this program
was sincere.
That's the last special program that came along that I had
anything to do with. I was pleased to be able to shepherd it
through the University budget process, and help Robert deal with
the issue, and also help him interpret seme of the traditional
concerns of the faculty and staff that he would encounter frcm
time to time.
275
XIII ADMINISTRATIVE ADJUSTMENTS TO UNIFY THE DIVISION
A Historical Overview
[Date of Interview: October 29. 1987] ##
Kendrick: We were going to talk today about the administrative adjustments
that were made during the course of my tenure as the vice
president, and there were a number of them.
Lage: Just let me put the date on here: October 29. 1987, our tenth
session. Okay, now, you're ready to start; you don't need a
question from me.
Kendrick: All right. The division was organized when I moved up into the
vice presidency in April of 1968 with a director of the
Agricultural Experiment Station and a director of what was then
known as Agricultural Extension [later, Cooperative Extension].
There was a special assistant to the vice president, Douglas
McNeill by name, and the usual administrative assistants, plus
some Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension
personnel keeping track of financial matters and the project
system.
That was satisfactory initially, but the thing that I
noticed over time was that the two directors had most of the
action.
Lage: The directors of the experiment station and extension?
Kendrick: Yes. They were the operating officers of their respective
organizations. The role of the vice president was one of
coordination and policy review and overall responsibility for the
total program. And that was the most difficult thing to do. I
think that probably characterized the principal challenge to the
chief administrative officer for the division, in those days as
well as today. The nature of the two activities of research and
276
Kendrick: extension are somewhat different, and their physical locations
are different. It presents a problem of how you operate a
unified program with several different functions.
Lage: From the beginning, were the two supposed to be coordinated? Is
that the goal?
Kendrick: I don't think it was ever consciously designed to be so. Both
research and extension- type programs were performed by the same
people back in the days of Hilgard.* The reason that Cooperative
Extension was established in the first place was to have a
program to introduce into practice the knowledge that was being
accumulated through research efforts by people in the experiment
stations. There are various ways of organizing state programs so
that that is brought about. Cornell coordinates their research
and extension programs by giving their professors part-time
extension appointments, thus funding part of their appointments
by an extension budget. By that procedure there's pretty close
integration of the activities of extension and research.
California is organized quite differently. B. H. Crocheron
was brought to the University, I think in about 1919. to set up
an extension program. It was designed to have a separate staff
and be a separate operation, so that the regular members of the
University's faculty did not have extension appointments in
addition to their research or teaching appointments.
There are advantages to both organizations. I don't think
that the New York system is necessarily better than the
California system. On paper, it suggests that there is a built-
in mechanism for close coordination, but as I studied the
organization in thinking about some possible adjustments of
California's system, it seemed to me that it wasn't functioning
any more effectively than our own system. The principal
deficiency of the Cornell system is that the extension personnel
located in the counties are paid by county funds. So that there
is a flaw in the central leadership's ability to exercise
appointment authority over the county people and to treat them as
fully integrated members of the unit. He who controls the purse
strings of the budget really controls the destiny of the program
and the people, and therefore there was a lack of central control
in New York — which let local units exert their will over what
might be seen as being in the best interest of the total program.
Lage: I wondered if they had a problem getting the professors to carry
out that portion of their appointment as extension service.
* Eugene W. Hilgard was founder of California's Agricultural
Experiment Station and dean of the College of Agriculture. 1888-
1904.
277
Kendrick: Well, I think they probably did. As I understood it, the amount
of time a professor spent on extension- like activities was
determined after the fact, rather than before the fact. In other
words, there was an accounting made at the end of the year by
asking the individual professors, "How much time did you spend in
extension work this past year?", and then a guesstimate was made
relative to that time, and that became the basis of time spent on
extension programs.
So I was not really impressed that that system was operating
as efficiently as it appeared to be on paper, even though it
showed a close paper coordination between research and extension
because it involved the same people doing both those activities.
In California, I think we built a stronger extension program by
having a separate organization of people, and having the
specialists in extension added to the staff because they had some
special expertise in a particular discipline. Those individuals
are now placed in the departments of their discipline and
provide the linkage between the experiment station activities
and the advisors located in the counties. All extension
personnel are funded and budgeted through the University's
budget, so there was never any doubt in anybody's mind that
county-based Cooperative Extension people were University of
California employees. That, I think, was a very wise decision,
in the early establishment of extension.
But the drawback, and there are drawbacks and deficiencies
in every organization — nothing seems to be perfect — is that the
organization tends to function as an individual organization, and
coordination of programs occurs more by luck than by design.
Cooperative Extension initially was run by a very dominating yet
benevolent administrator, B. H. Crocheron, who established it as
a quality organization. It almost resembled a paramilitary
group. People in extension were quite proud to be a part of it
and very loyal to their director. They felt somewhat special;
Crocheron kept them on their toes because he had no tolerance for
mediocrity or slovenliness. So when the chief came visiting, it
was almost like a military inspection.
Lage : This would be when he visited the county offices?
Kendrick: Yes. That military aura diminished with the subsequent
administrators, Earl Coke and George Alcorn.
Lage: Coke must have had a difficult place to fill, succeeding someone
with that much of a personal hold on —
Kendrick: Well, I think he did, but Earl Coke came closest to being the
ideal successor because he was a strong, dominating person in his
own right. He had some different ideas about the organization,
but there was never any doubt that Earl Coke was the director.
278
Kendrick: He went on to other responsibilities, including one as an
assistant secretary of agriculture. He took leave from his
directorship of Cooperative Extension for about a year and a
half. During that period, Cooperative Extension functioned with
an acting director. The acting director at that time was Wayne
Weeks.
The Link to the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Kendrick: But that's beyond my history. Let's go back to what I am leading
up to — in trying to lay the groundwork for correcting what I
perceived to be. if not a problem, at least a challenge to bring
Cooperative Extension's planning process into a closer link with
the experiment station. The director of the experiment station
was Clarence Kelly, and the action of the experiment station was
really on three campuses, where it was administered by the deans
who were also associate directors of the experiment station.
One also has to realize that both Cooperative Extension and
the Agricultural Experiment Station have funding and program
linkages with the United States Department of Agriculture. So
they are partially federally funded activities, and from the
USDA's perspective, those two operations at land-grant
institutions are agencies of a federal program. The directors
are recognized as officers of the USDA and the secretary of
agriculture gives tacit approval of their appointments. It's a
formality, but they are recognized as agents of the USDA. That's
necessary for them to have the authority to administer and handle
the federal funds that come into the respective programs.
Well, that describes a relationship between the USDA and the
directors that is clearly understood by the USDA and most of the
directors but generally not understood by the University, that
is, to an extent not understood or at least accepted by
University officers such as vice presidents and presidents who
have primary responsibility for their local institutions'
programs.
The chief administrative officer for agricultural programs
at land-grant institutions carry different titles. There are
vice presidents, deputy vice presidents, and by far the most
widely used title of dean. Each of the people who hold these
titles bears the responsibility for both extension and research.
But there is no official relationship between these overall
administrators and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
279
Kendrick: That manifested itself in California by the fact that the USDA
corresponding offices for extension and research communicated
directly with the directors rather than with the vice president.
I learned about federal matters only if my directors wanted to
tell me about them.
Lage: How much of the work of these two organizations was funded by and
overseen by the USDA? Was this a major portion of it?
Kendrick: Well, not in California. It varies from state to state.
California does not have a large USDA-funded extension or
experiment station program. About 20 percent of Cooperative
Extension's budget is derived from USDA's Smith-Lever funds, and
about five to seven percent of the experiment station's budget is
composed of the USDA's Hatch fund. Hatch funding for research is
allocated to faculty of the three campuses through a project
system. Faculty design projects and submit them through the
channels of the experiment station administration for approval.
Ultimately the USDA's office of Cooperative State Research
Service, which is responsible for the administration of the Hatch
Act must approve or disapprove these proposed projects.
Once their approval is given, an allocation can be made to
those projects from the Hatch fund, which comes to the University
as a bulk grant fund. The amount of the grant is based on a
formula that is really not in California's favor, because it is
based on the relationship of the number of farm units, and rural
population versus the urban population. We don't fare very well
in that formula because of the distribution of our rural and
urban populations.
Smith-Lever funds for Cooperative Extension are not
allocated by a project system but are commingled with state
appropriations, unless they are appropriated for special programs
such as urban gardening, or farm safety, or the nutritional
education program. The regular Smith-Lever funds are allocated
to states on the basis of a formula, which, again, did not favor
California in particular. They support the overall program in
extension through salary allocations.
The USDA annually received from the University's Cooperative
Extension organization a plan of work, which described by
standard categories what had been accomplished during the year
and what was proposed for the coming year. That plan of work
would be reviewed by the Office of the Extension Service in the
USDA, who after commenting about the proposals, would ultimately
sign off and approve it.
So there were two federal agencies acting on the programs of
two agricultural units in the University of California, and there
was no evidence that the USDA Office of Cooperative Research and
280
Kendrick: their Extension Service Office ever had any common goals or
common discussions about the state's research and extension
programs.
Lage: So. in Washington the two were not carefully coordinated?
Kendrick: That's correct. At the federal level the organization was
constructed in a way that kept the two operations separate. In
contrast, we had University officers who were charged with
coordinating the two activities.
Improving Budgetary Control over "The Provinces"
Kendrick: Well, other states, I had noticed, organized their programs with
deans who had overall responsibilities for teaching, research,
and extension. These individuals would carry simultaneously the
titles of dean and directors of both units, so that one person
had the responsibility for all three functions. That
administrative maneuver solved, at least administratively, the
communication problem between Washington and the local
institution. The operational responsibilities would then be
assigned to an associate director or an associate dean.
When I took office I was not aware of these different
arrangements, but I recognized that something needed to be done
to improve our planning and budgeting. The first administrative
change I made was in January of 1970, when I added another
special assistant to my staff named Russell McGregor. I had
become acquainted with Russell through some national activities
that I had for the USDA in serving on a committee to review the
research program of the Cooperative Research Service. Russell at
that time was a budget examiner for the federal Bureau of the
Budget, which ultimately became the Office of Management and
Budget, OMB. Russell was the examiner in that budget office
whose assignment was the USDA's research and extension program.
He seemed to be what I was looking for because he had a keen
analytical capacity and a planning background, and I thought the
division needed that kind of administrative assistance. He
willingly resigned from his federal post and came out to assume
the planning and analysis role for the division.
Lage: Could you give an example of the specific problems that there
were that made you see the need for these changes?
Kendrick: Well, I'm not sure that I know of any particular difficulty,
except that I felt the responsibility to plan effectively and to
develop a budget that could be described in program terms.
281
Kendrick: Cooperative Extension was not all that out of step with what
really needed to be done, but there was no evidence that its
budget development and planning were related to the programs that
described the division's activities. The national organization
of experiment stations had just developed a classification system
because they needed a way to file and retrieve the information
from the many research projects being conducted in all of the
states. They also needed this system in order to account for the
expenditure of funds at various levels of program aggregation.
The system adopted was called the CRIS system, Current Research
Information System. That came along about 1966.
So there was a major effort to get all the projects
classified in the new system. The CRIS system enabled us to
describe the amount of research effort going into pest and
disease control, or in agricultural production, or in water
resource studies, or in nutrition and the like. Those are just
the broad categories. I felt that in being able to analyze where
we were allocating our resources, we needed someone to aid in the
planning of future program changes as we sought to meet new
challenges.
Lage : It sounds as if you were getting better control over the budget.
Kendrick: Right. That was the goal. Russ had been doing that all the time
for the Office of Management and Budget as far as agriculture was
concerned, so he had a good background for the assignment I gave
him.
That effort was not resisted by our organization; in fact,
they cooperated pretty well. Russ was a little aggressive, and
he tended to attempt to pry information from campuses that they
weren't all that willing to share with the systemwide
administration. It's always a struggle between a systemwide
administration and the operating units that I refer to as "the
provinces." It's kind of a tug-of-war between the two.
Systemwide usually wants more information that the campuses don't
want to share, necessarily, because if they share it with
headquarters then they lose some of their power and control. The
same situation exists at state level — the more state funding that
goes into local school districts, the less prerogative local
school districts will have because the state will want to know
how they're allocating and spending state funds.
What I've described is not unique to the division; it's just
human nature and the nature of organizations. I'm sure it exists
in private enterprise also. But it's necessary to get a handle on
it because the people held responsible for reporting these things
are in central administrations. And I was the one who had to
testify in Sacramento as to the validity of the expenditure of
state funds for the University's agricultural programs. It
282
Kendrick: wasn't the directors, necessarily, unless I took them along with
me to talk about programs in detail. So Russ was the first
change.
The Day Committee;
Resources ##
Coordinated Planning for Allocation of
Lage: This was still while George Alcorn was head of Cooperative
Extension?
Kendrick: Yes. George and Kelly were the directors of their respective
units. Kelly had asked the late Boysie Day [deceased June 1988]
to come from Riverside to assist him. Boysie up to that time was
the associate director of the experiment station at Riverside. I
think I explained all that in an earlier session. Kelly needed
some assistance in managing the experiment station. He was not
in the best of health at that stage. Boysie came to Berkeley ir.
the role of associate director of the statewide experiment
station to give Kelly a helping hand.
If you recall in an earlier session, I said I had inherited
an academic planning group, which produced a report that didn't
go anywhere because I couldn't get any response or interest from
the campuses due to a number of administrative changes taking
place at Riverside and Davis at the time the report was issued.
So recognizing this deficiency, and at the strong suggestion of
my own administrative council, made up of the new deans and
directors, I asked a special committee to produce a planning
document. I asked them to identify in the program structure of
the CRIS system where we were allocating our resources and advise
me where some adjustments should be made in the allocations in
the future, with some attention to timing and phasing the
proposed changes in allocation. That committee became known as
the Day Committee because I asked Boysie to chair the effort. I
felt strongly that I needed representatives from the Berkeley,
Riverside, and Davis chancellors' offices in that effort, because
I needed their commitment to any plan that would emerge from the
work of the committee.
Lage: So this was kind of a long-range planning for research?
Kendrick: Yes. It turned out to be dominated by research planning. I was
really more concerned at that point with the planned allocation
of the positions that would become vacant in the experiment
station over time.
Lage: What areas they should be hiring —
283
Kendrick: Where we should adjust any reallocations if that was called for.
Lage: Did you mention earlier that this effort was related to the world
food situation?
Kendrick: Well, that came on a little bit later, and it came about from the
early flurry about the hunger in the world and at least a
superficial belief that what we needed to do was put more of our
resources into agricultural production activities. The world
hunger study was headed by Hal Carter and resulted in a
publication called The Hungry World. That activity was a little
later than the Day Committee activity I'm talking about. But the
Hungry World report certainly turned our attention to the fact
that we didn't need to overemphasize the production research
activities of the experiment station because there were more
crucial concerns relative to the distribution of existing food
reserves than a lack of its availability. Furthermore, the
report showed that there was a lot of productive capacity that
was not yet being used. At least up until about the turn of the
21st century, overemphasizing production in the United States
wasn't called for — what was needed was to bring in some new land
and new resources and improve the efficiency and use of existing
resources in some areas. And it pointed out that, with the
exception of Africa, most of the areas were potentially good
producers of agricultural products.
That, in fact, has been the case. We are observing a
worldwide increase in production of agricultural products. The
use of modern technology is not unique to the United States,
Canada, and Western Europe any more. These techniques have been
incorporated into the agriculture of South American countries,
also in the Middle East and some other countries that are
potentially good producing areas for agriculture. So the United
States's problem of world competition in its agricultural trade
was due largely to the fact that there's a lot of basic grain
supply available to people from countries other than the United
States, Canada, or western Europe. That's another subject, but
it's related to what must be considered when you are engaged in
long-range planning for agricultural research.
The difficulty of planning allocations for experiment
station personnel was also complicated by the fact that at both
Davis and Berkeley, and to some lesser extent at Riverside, we
had to factor in the teaching needs. Davis's teaching needs with
its rising student population almost dictated the place where you
could allocate your future resources, because of the fact that
you had to cover certain subject areas which were not necessarily
the most crucial areas for your research program. So you had to
make compromises relative to the allocation of those resources,
and as long as there was a student demand or a student load for a
284
Kendrick: particular kind of activity, you had to be certain that those
personnel were assembled so that they could cover and teach those
kinds of courses.
That is another reason why the chancellor and the vice
president had to listen to the pleas of the dean, who had the
direct responsibilities of responding to the clamor for more
resources to do this, that, and the other thing, particularly in
the teaching area. That resulted in annual meetings at campuses
where the chancellors and I listened to the deans make their case
for the allocation of resources. The chancellors and I would
agree to agree on the allocation of our respective resources — not
always agreeing with the deans.
Resistance to Reallocating Positions between Campuses or
De par tme nt s
Lage : Is there any specific case that you could describe to show how
that would work? Is there one that you recall where you had this
interaction between the dean, the chancellor and yourself, and
how it was resolved?
Kendrick: Well, no particular case. The thing that I discovered in this
process of review was that while there was willingness on the
part of the local campus administration to move positions from
one department to another department on that campus, there was
total rejection of a suggestion to move positions from one campus
to another one. Allocations within a campus were infinitely
easier to suggest and bring about.